lf-control. He takes an
enemy into his bosom, and suffers himself to be nosed about by him at
will. No one can tell what dreadful thing he may do when once he gives a
loose rein to his passions.

"The beginning of strife is as the letting out of waters." When you open
a little drain to a pond of water, it runs slowly at first, in a very
small stream; but the body of water above rushes into the channel and
wears it deeper, and that increases the pressure and widens it still
more, till presently the whole body comes pouring forth in an
irresistible torrent. One dry season, in the summer, a man in Vermont,
who owned a mill, on a small stream near a large pond, found his water
failing, so that his mill was likely to stop. To prevent this, he
collected together a few of the neighbors, and dug a little trench from
the pond to the stream that carried his mill. At first it ran very
slowly and quietly along, till it began to wear away the channel, and to
turn the force of the body of water in the pond in that direction, when
it increased violently, tore away the banks, and poured the whole
contents of the pond into the little stream, carried off the mill, and
rushed on with impetuous fury through the valley, sweeping away fences,
bridges, barns, houses, and every thing that came in its way.

At a place called _Brag Corner_, in the State of Maine, a small stream
falls into the Sandy river, on which a superior grist-mill was erected a
few years since. The stream not affording water enough, a pond
containing fifty or one hundred acres, having no outlet, and lying two
hundred feet above the level where the mill stood, was connected with
the stream that carried the mill by an artificial canal. The water of
the pond began to gully away the gravel over which it was made to run,
and having formed a regular channel, defied all human control, and, in
the space of six hours, cut a ravine seventy feet deep, and let out the
whole pond, sweeping away the mill, foundation and all, and carrying
away a house and blacksmith's shop, which stood near, not giving the
owner time to save any thing of consequence from his house.

Such, Solomon says, is strife. When you begin to quarrel, you know not
where it will end. It not unfrequently terminates in the death of one of
the parties, as in the following case: A boy about eleven years of age,
son of Mr. Philip Petty, of Westport, R. I., took his father's gun, as
he said, to go a gunning. His elder bro