and here that Hannibal was overthrown at Zama,
and was banished from Carthage; yet our hearts will always cry out with
Othello, 'Oh, the pity of it!'

THE APOSTLE OF THE LEPERS

No one can travel through the countries of the East or sail about the
lovely islands of the South Seas without constantly seeing before him
men and women dying of the most terrible of all diseases--leprosy. The
poor victims are cast out from their homes, and those who have loved
them most, shrink from them with the greatest horror, for one touch of
their bodies or their clothes might cause the wife or child to share
their doom. Special laws are made for them, special villages are set
apart for them, and in old times as they walked they were bound to utter
the warning cry,

'Room for the leper! Room!'

From time to time efforts have been made to help these unfortunate
beings, and over two hundred years ago a beautiful island in the AEgean
Sea, called Leros, was set apart for them, and a band of nuns opened a
hospital or lazar-house, as it was called, to do what they could to
lessen their sufferings, and sooner or later to share their fate.
Nobody, except perhaps the nuns' own relations, thought much about
them--people in those days considered illness and madness to be shameful
things, and best out of sight. The world was busy with discoveries of
new countries and with wars of conquest or religion, and those who had
no strength for the march fell by the wayside, and were left there.
Nowadays it is a little different; there are more good Samaritans and
fewer Levites; the wounded men are not only picked up on the road, but
sought out in their own homes, and are taken to hospitals, where they
are tended free of cost.

It is the story of a man in our own times, who gave himself up to the
saddest of lives and the most lonely of deaths, that I am now going to
tell you.

On a cold day in January 1841 a little boy was born in the city of
Louvain, in Belgium, to Monsieur and Madame Damien de Veuster. He had
already a brother a few years older, and for some time the children grew
up together, the younger in all ways looking up to the elder, who seemed
to know so much about everything. We have no idea what sort of lives
they led, but their mother was a good woman, who often went to the big
church in the town, and no doubt took her sons with her, and taught them
that it was nobler and better to serve Christ by helping others and
giving up the