wealth. But when the youth was grown to full
strength and beauty, one night Tito left his adopted father in slavery
and fled with his gold and gems into a foreign land. Years passed by
and, with his stolen wealth, Tito bought wife, palace, position, fame.
He had sown falsehood and cruelty, and nothing seemed so unlikely as
that he would reap a similar harvest. But one day the people
discovered his falsehood and attacked Tito. A mob pursued him through
the streets, and, knowing his strength as a swimmer, the youth cast
himself into the River Arno. When Tito had swum far down the river to
the other side, and, in his exhaustion, would go ashore, he looked up,
and, lo! he discerned the gray-haired father whom he had injured
trotting along the shore side by side with the swimmer. In the old
man's eyes blazed bitter hatred, in his hand flashed a sharp knife.
What the youth had sown years before now at last he was to reap. When
increasing weakness compelled him to approach the shore he looked
beseechingly to his father for mercy, but found only justice. With a
wild and bitter cry Tito reaped his harvest. Soon the mud of that
river filled the eyes and ears of him who years before had received
defilement into his heart. What seed he had sown, that Nature gave him
as a harvest--good measure, heaped up, and shaken together.

History permits no man to escape the reflection that if, for the time
being, individuals have escaped this moral law, nations have felt its
full force. Nature does, indeed, walk through the fields with
footsteps so gentle as to disturb no drop of dew hanging upon the blade
of grass. Nature also hath her sterner aspect, and for the sons of
iniquity her footsteps are earthquakes, her strokes are strokes of war
and of pestilence. When Sophocles worked out the law of moral
retribution for King Oedipus and Antigone, his daughter, the poet might
well have gone on to note that if the Grecian army had sacked the
Trojan cities the time would come when the Roman fleet would sack her
cities and make her sons to toil as captives. Later on, if the Roman
conquerors swept the East for corn and wheat, looted stores and shops,
pillaged palaces for treasure for triumphal processions, the time came
when Nature and God decreed that the vast wealth piled up in the Roman
capital should excite the cupidity of the Goths, until at last the
streets of that great city were swept with flame and store-houses were
pillaged b