Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/173

 Meschianza, also discovered by me, both of them of great interest because of the light they throw upon that struggle.

I still remember the day when, being than a child seven years of age, perhaps, I picked up in the garden a piece of white flint of curious shape and took it to my father to make inquiries. I recall with complete distinctness, after so many impressions made since have disappeared, its shape, the corner of the garden in which it lay, and even the time of the day. He explained to me that I had found an arrow head made by the Indians and he pointed out to me the details of manufacture and the method of use. A very slight incident often is not only the beginning of habit, but the turning point of character. A career is often fixed by the most trivial of occurrences. If any fact, no matter how comparatively unimportant it seemed, could be omitted from the past, the whole history of the world would be changed. If three hundred years ago a young man had not, upon a summer evening, gone out to the garden gate, George Washington would never have been born, and the colonies perhaps would have remained dependencies. If a Dutchman had lost instead of making a profit on a negro slave three hundred years ago there might have been no Battle at Gettysburg.

John H. Converse once told me that when he was a young man, anxiously seeking an opportunity in life, he was offered a clerkship at a small salary in Chicago and had made all of his arrangements to go there gladly. At the last moment some unexpected event occurred to prevent, and he remained in Philadelphia to become, eventually, the head of the Baldwin Locomotive Works.

I never overcame the tendency which started when my father enabled me to understand the significance of the piece of quartz I had picked up, and all through my boyhood and young manhood, upon occasion, I hunted through the fields, which had been plowed for corn, for the implements lost or thrown away by the Indians, and Rh