Only A Trifle.


"Oh! That isn't much," said Laura, when,

she was reproved for her carelessness in 

dropping a tumbler and breaking it. "It was

only a common glass." And so she was apt

to say about many of her careless words and

acts which brought trouble and inconvenience

to others.

So many children are apt to think of their

little deeds and words; but there is nothing

so little but that numbers of them may work

great harm or good.

There is hardly a smaller insect than the

ant, yet armies of them sometimes destroy

every green thing on the face of a large tract

of country over which they pass.

A certain kind of beetle deposits its eggs

in the bark of the pine tree, and the little

grubs, or larvae’s, hatched from it often destroy

large tracts of timber as surely as if a

fire had swept over it. In one great wood

of two thousand acres, scarcely ten trees in a

hundred escaped destruction from the ravages

of little black winged bugs. Some of

these pines were a hundred and fifty feet in

height and three feet in diameter; but there

they stood, dead and stripped of their bark,

their naked arms bleaching in the sun and

crumbling and crashing before every blast.

It is said that the product of three gnat

flies will destroy the body of a dead horse as

thoroughly as a lion could.

Our farmers know very well what havoc a

little insect called the weevil makes with the

grains, eating the hearts out of whole granaries

full, and leaving only the empty husk, or

hull. So in the dreaded years when the

plague of locusts visits our land, the fields

are left bare and fruitless.

So little acts of sin eat out the soul's life.

Not one can rightly be called a trifle. It is

sure to bring a hundred others in its train.

Did you ever notice how fast a lie multiplies

itself? If you were ever tempted to tell one,

were you not soon guilty of many more to

cover up the first? And so of every other sin.

Beware of the beginnings. 




Child's World.