I have here quoted one of the grandest flights of the human fancy, and with a purpose.  If God, who is perfection, and in whose image we are faintly formed, watches the weakliest of his lambs, supports the weariest of his poor sparrows, should not we, in trying to be true men, endeavor to pay equal care to all things intrusted to our attention, be they great or be they small!  And more than that.  The little errors beget myriads of their kind.  “Many mickles make a muckle.”  The habit sooner or later, leads some of us into an awful abyss, where it had been better we had not lived.  Errors creep into character just as ideas get into our brain.  Says Moore: 

     And how like forts, to which beleaguers win
     Unhoped-for entrance through some friend within,
     One clear idea, wakened in the breast
     By memory’s magic, lets in all the rest.

Says Franklin:  “A little neglect may breed great mischief; for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the driver was lost; being overtaken and slain by an enemy, all for the want of care about a horse-shoe nail.”  “In persons grafted with a serious trust,” says Shakspeare “negligence is a serious crime.”  And so it is.

STORY OF SAG BRIDGE.

In September, 1873, a conductor on the Chicago and Alton Railroad started south with a freight train.  He was to stop at a station a few miles from Joliet and wait for the incoming passenger train from St. Louis.  He consulted his watch.  That unhappy piece of mechanism told him that he had time to reach the next station.  He spoke to the operator of the telegraph.  That person could give him no information as to where the passenger train was, and he, determining not to wait, pulled out.  As his train was still within hearing, the operator rushed to the platform with the news that the passenger train had left the nearest station!  The operator knew that

TWO TRAINS WERE ABOUT TO COME IN COLLISION,

a knowledge that has sometimes deprived railroad men of their minds forever.  Soon the awful shock reverberated afar, and from nine to fifteen persons were killed in a horrible manner.  One of the most prominent men of Chicago was scalded so that the flesh left his skeleton.  An unkind fate preserved the conductor to confront his ignominy.  It was found that

HE HAD FORGOTTEN TO WIND UP HIS WATCH!

How could such a butchery have been brought about, save by a course of small errors which had eaten into his moral nature, leaving him a great ghoulish fiend of Carelessness, running his pitiless Juggernaut up and down the highway between two great cities!  The hideous errors made by men are always indicative of those particular men.  Some people never make errors at all!  Why?  Because they are careful.  Simple, is it not—­like Napoleon’s tactics?  Yet that constant care is so wonderful in its effects that human science cannot peer into the mystery of its action.  Men laboring under total aberration of the mind have been known to carefully wind a clock at a given hour, and evince no other power to do a reasonable thing.  Begin early in life to do all these little things with the greatest care.