ink that the appearance of _interior_ force of elevation is for
the most part deceptive. The series of beds would be found, if examined
in section, very uniform in their arrangement, only a little harder in
one place, and more delicate in another. A stream receives a slight
impulse this way or that, at the top of the hill, but increases in
energy and sweep as it descends, gathering into itself others from its
sides, and uniting their power with its own. A single knot of quartz
occurring in a flake of slate at the crest of the ridge may alter the
entire destinies of the mountain form. It may turn the little rivulet of
water to the right or left, and that little turn will be to the future
direction of the gathering stream what the touch of a finger on the
barrel of a rifle would be to the direction of the bullet. Each
succeeding year increases the importance of every determined form, and
arranges in masses yet more and more harmonious, the promontories shaped
by the sweeping of the eternal waterfalls.

Sec. 23. The importance of the results thus obtained by the slightest
change of direction in the infant streamlets, furnishes an interesting
type of the formation of human characters by habit. Every one of those
notable ravines and crags is the expression, not of any sudden violence
done to the mountain, but of its little _habits_, persisted in
continually. It was created with one ruling instinct; but its destiny
depended nevertheless, for effective result, on the direction of the
small and all but invisible tricklings of water, in which the first
shower of rain found its way down its sides. The feeblest, most
insensible oozings of the drops of dew among its dust were in reality
arbiters of its eternal form; commissioned, with a touch more tender
than that of a child's finger,--as silent and slight as the fall of a
half-checked tear on a maiden's cheek,--to fix for ever the forms of
peak and precipice, and hew those leagues of lifted granite into the
shapes that were to divide the earth and its kingdoms. Once the little
stone evaded,--once the dim furrow traced,--and the peak was for ever
invested with its majesty, the ravine for ever doomed to its
degradation. Thenceforward, day by day, the subtle habit gained in
power; the evaded stone was left with wider basement; the chosen furrow
deepened with swifter-sliding wave; repentance and arrest were alike
impossible, and hour after hour saw written in larger and rockier
charac