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be changed, and the labour will fail and be use- 

 less. The nearer the beginning that the deviation 

 from the right course is, the farther are matters 

 put wrong. One tenth part of an inch of error in 

 the levelling of a gun, may throw the bullet fifty 

 yards wide of its mark. One pace taken six 

 inches longer or shorter than the one before it, 

 will turn quite aside and cause to lose his way, 

 on a trackless moor and enveloped in fog, a man 

 who started in the proper direction to where he 

 was going. Life is to us all not unlike the moor 

 in the fog, we must find our way much more 

 by that which is in us than from external things ; 

 and if we are heedless of steps, we never can get 

 straight on to our purpose, but will often wander 

 so obliquely as, without being at all aware of it, 

 to turn completely round, and end where we be- 

 gan. That is the case with those who go occa- 

 sionally to the foggy and pathless moors. They 

 set out from the cottage on the one side in exactly 

 the proper direction, but as they have been accus- 

 tomed to follow beaten tracks to be mere copyists 

 of others, they deviate without knowing it, and 

 very often night brings them back hungry and ex- 

 hausted, though all the time they have a firm be- 

 lief that they are going in the direction of that 

 place on the opposite side which they ought to have 

 reachedbeforemid-day. Indeed, to those who do not 

 take heed how they walk, sunshine and surround- 

 ing objects are not to be depended on, because, in 

 places that are strange to us, we sometimes cannot 

 convince ourselves that the south is not the north, 

 although the mid- day is shining there in all its 

 splendour. There is no man, who has walked 

 much about among lonely places, that has not often 

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