crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground,
such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge
and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken
word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw
up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some
damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and
substances of nature,--water, snow, wind, gravitation,--
become penalties to the thief.

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for
all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love
is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an
algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which
like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you
cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against
Napoleon, when he approached cast down their colors and from
enemies became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as
sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors:--

"Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing."

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no
man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him,
so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made
useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and
blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved
him, and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns
destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his