Minucius Felix — Octavius 3

III. Then Octavius said: "It is not of a good man, brother Marcus, so to abandon a human clinging to your side at home and abroad in this blindness of vulgar ignorance that on so bright a day you allow him to strike against stones—figured, to be sure, and anointed and crowned—when you know that of this error no less infamy flows back upon you than upon him."

With this speech of his we traversed the middle space of the city and already held the free shore. There a gentle wave, pouring over, stretched the outermost sands as if it were spreading a walkway; and, as the sea is always restless even when the breezes are laid, although it was not going out to land with white and foaming waves, yet we were delighted by the curled and winding wanderings there, when we wet our soles on the very threshold of the sea, because by turns now the wave, driven to our feet, would play, now slipping back and drawing the footprints would suck them into itself.

So advancing gradually and quietly we were picking the edge of the softly curved shore with beguiling talks. These talks were Octavius's narration discoursing about a voyage. But when we had consumed a sufficiently just space of walking with conversation, measuring the same way again we were wearing it with turned steps, and when we had come to that place where boats drawn up, suspended from earthly ruin on underlaid timbers, were resting, we see boys eagerly competing to play with throwings of shells into the sea.

That game is to pick from the shore a smooth shell polished by the casting of the waves, and that shell grasped with the fingers in a flat position to spin aslant and as low as possible over the waves, so that that missile either skims swimming over the back of the sea while it glides with gentle force, or, shearing the top of the waves, flashes and emerges while it is lifted by repeated leaping. He among the boys was claiming himself victor whose shell both ran farther and leapt more often.