you accept; and perhaps some slight and fanciful consideration is allowed to turn the scale.  But now you look back, and you can see that there was the turning-point in your life; it was because you went there to the right, and not to the left, that you are now a great English prelate, and not a humble Scotch professor.  Was there not a time in a certain great man’s life, at which the lines of rail diverged, and at which the question was settled, Should he be a minister of the Scotch Kirk, or should he be Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain?  I can imagine a stage in the history of a lad in a counting-house, at which the little angle of rail may be pushed in or pushed back that shall send the train to one of two places five hundred miles asunder:  it may depend upon whether he shall take or not take that half-crown, whether, thirty years after, he shall be taking the chair, a rubicund baronet, at a missionary society meeting, and receive the commendations of philanthropic peers and earnest bishops, or be laboring in chains at Norfolk Island, a brutalized, cursing, hardened, scourge-scarred, despairing wretch, without a hope for this life or the other.  Oh, how much may turn upon a little thing!  Because the railway train in which you were coming to a certain place was stopped by a snowstorm, the whole character of your life may have been changed.  Because some one was in the drawing-room when you went to see Miss Smith on a certain day, resolved to put to her a certain question, you missed the tide, you lost your chance, you went away to Australia and never saw her more.  It fell upon a day that a ship, coming from Melbourne, was weathering a rocky point on an iron-bound coast, and was driven close upon that perilous shore.  They tried to put her about; it was the last chance.  It was a moment of awful risk and decision.  If the wind catches the sails, now shivering as the ship comes up, on the right side, then all on board are safe.  If the wind catches the sails on the other side, then all on board must perish.  And so it all depends upon which surface of certain square yards of canvas the uncertain breeze shall strike, whether John Smith, who is coming home from the diggings with twenty thousand pounds, shall go down and never be heard of again by his poor mother and sisters away in Scotland,—­or whether he shall get safely back, a rich man, to gladden their hearts, and buy a pretty little place, and improve the house on it into the pleasantest picture, and purchase, and ride, and drive various horses, and be seen on market-days sauntering in the High Street of the county-town, and get married, and run about the lawn before his door, chasing his little children, and become a decent elder of the Church, and live quietly and happily for many years.  Yes, from what precise point of the compass the next flaw of wind should come would decide the question between the long homely life in Scotland and a nameless burial deep in a foreign sea.