I

LITTLE THINGS

In the second chapter of the Song of Songs and in the fifteenth verse you may read these words: "Take me the little foxes that spoil the vines."

How often you hear people say, "Oh, well, it's so little! What difference will such a little thing make?" And yet—

Every girl and boy knows that the mighty ocean is made up of tiny drops. The great Niagara is, too. Its noise is simply the small patter of drops multiplied into a thunder.

The little drops are made of molecules, which though Science gives them a big name, are so small you cannot see them.

A great castle or a mighty palace is built up of small bricks and stones and pieces of wood and iron, put together with small pegs and pins.

The lovely windows are made of panes of glass; each pane being sand grains heated and fused.

The great Western harvests that cover the plains with gold, and feed the world, come from little grains of seed wheat, any one of which could be lost and never missed. But if all the little seeds were lost, there would be no harvest.

These wonderful bodies of ours, Science says, are built up of cells that are only known through the microscope.

We are now told that the matter that makes our bodies and the great world is a centre of the tiniest bits of revolving force called electric ions, which nobody has ever seen. A pin-head is not very big, but it has a whole system of these revolving little things as wonderful as the way in which the planets roll round the sun.

Across the continent stretches a great road of iron called the C.P.R. or the National R.R., and both never could have been but for littles.

The iron comes from ore in the mines, picked out with small picks, one pick at a time. The ties on which the rails rest are trees that once were little seeds. The gravel of the road bed is made of heaps of sand, shovelled with hand shovels, one shovel at a time.

The engine strength lies in pins that couple, and joints that unite all its wonderful parts. When the fire is started that makes the steam, the fireman builds it with small sticks and pieces of wood and spends his time shovelling little coals out of the tender.

When the train is loaded, it has a mighty weight; but each car was filled with bundles one at a time. The passenger coaches fill up one by one, with persons who travel with a little piece of paper called a ticket, that gives them right of way.

Little, you say! Why, there is nothing real that is little! It only looks little on the surface. Think more deeply and you will see how big all real things are!

So of your character and mine.

A big man is one who has big ideas and plans, and these can never be weighed or measured.

Big events are due to little long continued acts and thoughts, each of which looks small; but taken together