ONLY A CRACK.
"CAN you see it?"
"Where?"
"That little crack stretching across the ice ahead! Look out, Tommy!"
"Nonsense!" says Tommy, skating over that thin little line of danger, "Only a crack!"
It is lengthening, though—widening!
"Look out, Tommy!" is the warning again sounded to the returning skater.
"......!" says the offended Tommy, pushing on; but the ice does not "shut up" at all. It yields, opens, and lets Tommy into an Arctic bath!
"H-e-l-p-p-p-p!" is the cry ringing out all over the pond. "Fetch a board there!" "Throw him the end of your comforter!" "Get a rope!"
"Quick, quick!" are the excited outcries on either hand.
At last Tommy is pulled out, his hands purple, his lips white, his teeth chattering. A minute more and he would have been stretched out on the bottom of the pond! What a serious risk he ran!
"Only a crack!"
That is the trouble with Frank Peters. He takes, now and then, a glass of beer.
".....:" he says, to mother, father, Sabbath-school teacher, and all the time the crack is opening, widening, a gap today—and it may be a grave tomorrow: Look out!
—Select
FIRST WRONG STEP.
THE young man who ruined himself by robbing the post-office in Chicago, where he was clerk, confessed his crime after his arrest, and said, "The greater part of the money was taken in small sums.
After robbing the first letter, all fear and compunction of conscience were gone, and in a little while it became impossible 'for me to pass a money package through my hands without stealing it."
What a solemn and awful warning is this to not take the first wrong step.
That step taken, the next is easy, the next is easier, and you are fairly on the road to ruin. Struggle manfully, struggle prayerfully, struggle as for your life, against the first temptation, the first false step, the first sinful act. Yield the first outpost to the great enemy of your soul, and you run the fearful hazard that you will be lost.
—S. S. Visitor.
GRATITUDE is the music of the heart when its chords are swept by kindness.