severely flogged by the master of the plantation. Being sent to
another plantation, he repeated the same thing there, and when at
length liberty was proclaimed throughout the island, and the Bible
Society offered a New Testament to every negro who could read, the
number taught through this slave's instrumentality was found to be no
less than six hundred.

A famous ruby was offered to the English government. The report of the
crown jeweler was that it was the finest he had ever seen or heard of,
but that one of the "facets" was slightly fractured. That invisible
fracture reduced its value thousands of dollars, and it was rejected
from the regalia of England.

It was a little thing for the janitor to leave a lamp swinging in the
cathedral at Pisa, but in that steady swaying motion the boy Galileo
saw the pendulum, and conceived the idea of thus measuring time.

"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," said Edison, "when
the vibrations of my voice caused a fine steel point to pierce one of
my fingers held just behind it. That set me to thinking. If I could
record the motions of the point and send it over the same surface
afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk. I determined
to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants
the necessary instructions, telling them what I had discovered. That's
the whole story. The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a
finger."

It was a little thing for a cow to kick over a lantern left in a
shanty, but it laid Chicago in ashes, and rendered homeless a hundred
thousand people.

You turned a cold shoulder but once, you made but one stinging remark,
yet it lost you a friend forever.

Some little weakness, some self-indulgence, a quick temper, want of
decision, are little things, you say, when placed beside great
abilities, but they have wrecked many a career. The Parliament of
Great Britain, the Congress of the United States, and representative
governments all over the world have come from King John signing the
Magna Charta.

Bentham says, "The turn of a sentence has decided many a friendship,
and, for aught we know, the fate of many a kingdom."

The sight of a stranded cuttlefish led Cuvier to an investigation which
made him one of the greatest natural historians in the world. The web
of a spider suggested to Captain Brown the idea of a suspension bridge.
A man, looking for a lost horse, picked up a stone in the Idaho