hold dear, and compel to seek in some new country far away a place where
to hide their shame and misery, they had just as little thought of
taking that miserable step as you, my reader, have of taking one like
it. And perhaps there are human beings in this world, held in the
highest esteem, and with not a speck on their snow-white reputation, who
know within themselves that they have barely escaped the gulf, that
the moment has been in which all their future lot was trembling in the
balance, and that a grain's weight more in the scale of evil and by this
time they might have been reckoned among the most degraded and abandoned
of the race. But probably the first deviation, either to right or left,
is in most cases a very small one. You know, my friend, what is meant by
the _points_ upon a railway. By moving a lever, the rails upon which the
train is advancing are, at a certain place, broadened or narrowed by
about the eighth of an inch. That little movement decides whether
the train shall go north or south. Twenty carriages have come so far
together; but here is a junction station, and the train is to be
divided. The first ten carriages deviate from the main line by a
fraction of an inch at first; but in a few minutes the two portions of
the train are flying on, miles apart. You cannot see the one from the
other, save by distant puffs of white steam through the clumps of trees.
Perhaps already a high hill has intervened, and each train is on its
solitary way,--one to end its course, after some hours, amid the roar
and smoke and bare ugliness of some huge manufacturing town; and the
other to come through green fields to the quaint, quiet, dreamy-looking
little city, whose place is marked, across the plain, by the noble spire
of the gray cathedral rising into the summer blue. We come to such
points in our journey through life,--railway-points, as it were, which
decide not merely our lot in life, but even what kind of folk we shall
be, morally and intellectually. A hair's breadth may make the deviation
at first. Two situations are offered you at once: you think there is