where or when the results of one man’s evil-doing shall cease? The seed of sin engenders no common root, shooting straight upwards through the earth, and bearing a given crop. It is the germ of a foul running weed, whose straggling suckers travel underground beyond the ken of mortal eye, beyond the power of mortal calculation.” And so again the caustic showman of “Vanity Fair,” in his last completed work, paused to explain how a culprit’s evil behaviour of five and twenty years back, brought present grief and loss of rest to three unoffending persons; and he characteristically utters the wistful wish that we “could all take the punishment for our individual crimes on our individual shoulders,” but laments the futility of any such wish, recognising as he does so plainly that when the culprit is condemned to hang, it is those connected with him who have to weep and suffer, and wear piteous mourning in their hearts long after he has jumped off the Tyburn ladder. We conclude with a suggestive stanza of Mr. Robert Browning’s, worth learning by heart in more senses than one: he is speaking of the soul declaring itself by its fruit—the thing it does:— “Be Hate that fruit, or Love that fruit, It forwards the general deed of Man; And each of the many helps to recruit The life of the race by a general plan, Each living his own, to boot.” _SILENT SYMPATHY._ JOB ii. 13. Job’s friends have long since been a sort of bye-word. But be it not forgotten that the friendship of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, to the ruined and desolate man of Uz, evidences itself as very genuine in one or two salient points, before it came to be, what it is apt to be now exclusively considered, all talk. Before the talk there was prolonged silence; and before the silence there was lamentation of undoubted earnest. Coming from afar to mourn with him, and to comfort him, from afar off they caught sight of him, but so altered—_heu, quantum mutatus!_—that they lifted up their voice and wept; and they rent each one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. And then they “sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, _and none spake a word unto him_; for they saw that his grief was very great.” The sonnet of a Quaker poet has thus far vindicated the sincerity of their friendship, and on the ground of their silent sympathy: