Men’s “little ways” are usually more interesting, and often more instructive than their grand manners.  When they are off guard, they frequently show to better advantage than when they are on parade.  I get more pleasure out of Boswell’s Johnson than I do out of Rasselas or The Rambler.  The Little Flowers of St. Francis appear to me far more precious than the most learned German and French analyses of his character.  There is a passage in Jonathan Edwards’ Personal Narrative, about a certain walk that he took in the fields near his father’s house, and the blossoming of the flowers in the spring, which I would not exchange for the whole of his dissertation On the Freedom of the Will.  And the very best thing of Charles Darwin’s that I know is a bit from a letter to his wife:  “At last I fell asleep,” says he, “on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw; and I did not care one penny how any of the birds or beasts had been formed.”

Little rivers have small responsibilities.  They are not expected to bear huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand horse-power to the factories of a monstrous town.  Neither do you come to them hoping to draw out Leviathan with a hook.  It is enough if they run a harmless, amiable course, and keep the groves and fields green and fresh along their banks, and offer a happy alternation of nimble rapids and quiet pools,

     “With here and there a lusty trout,
     And here and there a grayling.”

When you set out to explore one of these minor streams in your canoe, you have no intention of epoch-making discoveries, or thrilling and world-famous adventures.  You float placidly down the long stillwaters, and make your way patiently through the tangle of fallen trees that block the stream, and run the smaller falls, and carry your boat around the larger ones, with no loftier ambition than to reach a good camp-ground before dark and to pass the intervening hours pleasantly, “without offence to God or man.”  It is an agreeable and advantageous frame of mind for one who has done his fair share of work in the world, and is not inclined to grumble at his wages.  There are few moods in which we are more susceptible of gentle instruction; and I suspect there are many tempers and attitudes, often called virtuous, in which the human spirit appears to less advantage in the sight of Heaven.

It is not required of every man and woman to be, or to do, something great; most of us must content ourselves with taking small parts in the chorus.  Shall we have no little lyrics because Homer and Dante have written epics?  And because we have heard the great organ at Freiburg, shall the sound of Kathi’s zither in the alpine hut please us no more?  Even those who have greatness thrust upon them will do well to lay the burden down now and then, and congratulate themselves that they are not altogether answerable for the conduct of the universe, or at least not all the time.  “I reckon,” said a cowboy to me one day, as we were riding through the Bad Lands of Dakota, “there’s some one bigger than me, running this outfit.  He can ’tend to it well enough, while I smoke my pipe after the round-up.”