When one of his friends asked Scopas the Thessalian for something that could be of little use to him, he answered, "It is in these useless and superfluous things that I am rich and happy."
It was the little foxes that spoiled the vines in Solomon's day. Mites play mischief now with our meal and cheese, moths with our woolens and furs, and mice in our pantries. More than half our diseases are produced by infinitesimal creatures called microbes.
Most people call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice. There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the peace, the happiness, of a home.
"We call the large majority of human lives obscure," says Bulwer, "presumptuous that we are! How know we what lives a single thought retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown?"
The theft of a diamond necklace from a French queen convulsed Europe. From the careful and persistent accumulation of innumerable facts, each trivial in itself, but in the aggregate forming a mass of evidence, a Darwin extracts his law of evolution, and Linnaeus constructs the science of botany. A pan of water and two thermometers were the tools by which Dr. Black discovered latent heat, and a prism, a lens, and a sheet of pasteboard enabled Newton to unfold the composition of light and the origin of colors. An eminent foreign savant called on Dr. Wollaston, and asked to be shown over those laboratories of his in which science had been enriched by so many great discoveries, when the doctor took him into a little study, and, pointing to an old tea tray on the table, on which stood a few watch glasses, test papers, a small balance, and a blow-pipe, said, "There is my laboratory." A burnt stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and paper. A single potato, carried to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth century, has multiplied into food for millions, driving famine from Ireland again and again.
It seemed a small thing to drive William Brewster, John Robinson, and the poor people of Austerfield and Scrooby into perpetual exile, but as Pilgrims they became the founders of a mighty people. A cloud may hide the sun which it cannot extinguish.
"Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth." "A look of vexation or a word coldly spoken, or a little help thoughtlessly withheld, may produce long issues of regret."
It was but a little dispute, a little flash of temper, the trigger was pulled in an instant, but the soul returned never.
A few immortal sentences from Garrison and Phillips, a few poems from Lowell and Whittier, and the leaven is at work which will not cease its action until the whipping-post and bodily servitude are abolished forever.
"For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the rider was lost, and all,"