also how much worse we might have been.  Sometimes the present state of matters, good or bad, is the result of long training, of influences that were at work through many years, and that produced their effect so gradually that we never remarked the steps of the process, till some day we waken up to a sense of the fact, and find ourselves perhaps a great deal better, probably a great deal worse, than we had been vaguely imagining.  But the case is not unfrequently otherwise.  Sometimes one testing-time decided whether we should go to the left or to the right.  There are in the moral world things analogous to the sudden accident which makes a man blind or lame for life:  in an instant there is wrought a permanent deterioration.  Perhaps a few minutes before man or woman took the step which can never be retraced, which must banish forever from all they 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 hardly anything to choose between them.  It does not matter which