If no good work that a man does is lost—the smallest useful work, as an octogenarian essayist assures us, continuing to be useful long after the man is dead and forgotten, so neither do bad actions die with the doer. “Future generations suffer for the sin of their ancestors, and one great crime or act of folly causes the misery of unborn millions.” So all things, it is added, hang together in one unbroken chain, of which we see a few links, but the beginning and the end we see not and never shall see. Seneca was writing for all time when he said that no man’s error is confined to himself, but affects all around him, whether by example, or consequences, or both: “_nemo errat uni sibi_.” A latter-day philosopher assigns to a place among the most insoluble riddles propounded to mortal comprehension what he calls the fatal decree by which every crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons as well as of the single guilty one. “Ah!” exclaims Hilda to guilty Miriam, in the story of “Transformation,”—“now I understand how the sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin for those that follow. While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!” To apply the lines of a reflective poet,— “’Tis not their own crimes only, men commit; They harrow them into another’s breast, And they shall reap the growth with bitter pain.” Very forcibly Mr. Isaac Taylor warns us that in almost every event of life the remote consequences vastly outweigh the proximate in actual amount of importance; and he undertakes to show, on principles even of mathematical calculation, that each individual of the human family holds in his hand the centre lines of an interminable web-work, on which are sustained the fortunes of multitudes of his successors; the implicated consequences, if summed together, making up therefore a weight of human weal or woe that is reflected back with an incalculable momentum upon the lot of each. The practical conclusion is that every one is bound to remember that the personal sufferings or peculiar vicissitudes or toils through which he is called to pass are to be estimated and explained only in an immeasurably small proportion if his single welfare is regarded, while their “full price and value are not to be computed unless the drops of the morning dew could be numbered.” So the most popular of domestic story-tellers expatiates in an early work on the impossibility of wiping off from us, as with a wet cloth, the stains left by the fault of those who are near to us. Another of the tribe, but more “sensational” in subject and style, is keen to show how the influence of a man’s evil deed slowly percolates through insidious channels of which he never dreams; how the deed of folly or of guilt is still active for evil when the sinner who committed it has forgotten his wickedness. “Who shall say