n the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught."

But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame?
What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than
a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our
minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of
action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with
us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless,
characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil
then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall
personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of
distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid
vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts,
zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe
we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking,
except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this
will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then,
evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which
should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but
the evil effect?

Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite
shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or
one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the
lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle
fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it
weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were
concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made
me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the
thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in
point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated
itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle
died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself
that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no
further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time.
Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre
just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a
fourth pebble into the c