s warped the giant oak forever."

The mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing.--SCOTCH
PROVERB.

"The bad thing about a little sin is that it won't stay little."

"A little bit of patience often makes the sunshine come,
And a little bit of love makes a very happy home;
A little bit of hope makes a rainy day look gay,
And a little bit of charity makes glad a weary way."

"Arletta's pretty feet, glistening in the brook, made her the mother of
William the Conqueror," says Palgrave's "History of Normandy and
England." "Had she not thus fascinated Duke Robert the Liberal, of
Normandy, Harold would not have fallen at Hastings, no Anglo-Norman
dynasty could have arisen, no British Empire."

* * * * * *

[Illustration: AGASSIZ]

Small things become great when a great soul sees them. Trifles light
as air sometimes suggest to the thinking mind ideas which revolutionize
the world.

* * * * * *

We may tell which way the wind blew before the Deluge by marking the
ripple and cupping of the rain in the petrified sand now preserved
forever. We tell the very path by which gigantic creatures, whom man
never saw, walked to the river's edge to find their food.

The tears of Veturia and Volumnia saved Rome from the Volscians when
nothing else could move the vengeful heart of Coriolanus.

It was little Greece that rolled back the overflowing tide of Asiatic
luxury and despotism, giving instead to Europe and America models of
the highest political freedom yet attained, and germs of limitless
mental growth. A different result at Plataea had delayed the progress
of the human race more than ten centuries.

Among the lofty Alps, it is said, the guides sometimes demand absolute
silence, lest the vibration of the voice bring down an avalanche.

The power of observation in the American Indian would put many an
educated man to shame. Returning home, an Indian discovered that his
venison, which had been hanging up to dry, had been stolen. After
careful observation he started to track the thief through the woods.
Meeting a man on the route, he asked him if he had seen a little, old,
white man, with a short gun, and with a small bob-tailed dog. The man
told him he had met such a man, but was surprised to find that the
Indian had not even seen the one he described. He asked the Indian how
he could give such a minute description of the man whom he