CAUSE AND EFFECT.
Small circumstances illustrate great principles. To-day my dinner cost me sixpence less than usual. This is an incident not quite so important as some others recorded in history, but the causes of it originated more than two thousand years ago. It will also serve to explain the principle, that causes are primary and secondary, remote and immediate,—and that historians, when they speak of certain effects as produced by certain causes. Socrates one day had a conversation with Aristippus, in which he threw out certain remarks on the subject of temperance. Being overheard by Xenophon, they were subsequently committed to writing and published by him. These, falling in my way last evening, made such an impression on my mind, that I was induced to-day to forego my customary piece of pudding after dinner, to the loss of the eating-house proprietor, whose receipts were thus diminished, first, by a few observations of an ancient Greek, secondly, by a report given of them by a bystander, and, thirdly, by the accidental perusal of them, after twenty centuries, by one of his customers.