It must have been a matter of surprise to most of us who have arrived at, or passed, middle life, on looking back through a vista of years, to note what an astonishingly important part has been played in our lives by entirely trivial circumstances. It has, indeed, become a common-place that “great events from little causes spring”; but we do not realise, until we actually submit our experiences to analysis, how the whole tenour and meaning of our lives has in many cases been determined by some occurrence so unimportant that, at the time, it appears incredible that it should have any consequences at all.
Yet so it is. Not only great and critical events which occupy our attention at the time and impress themselves afterwards upon our memory, but trifling circumstances that pass almost unnoticed and are straightway forgotten generate each its train of consequences; and when in retrospect we retrace our steps through the busy years, we are apt to find the starting-point of the main action of our life in some little incident that had long since passed out of recollection until thus recalled by association.
