ople to take refuge at the Austrian consul's house. A shot ended his
life, and saved him from the tortures that men like the mahdi inflict on
their captives. Death, as we know, had no terrors for him. 'I am always
ready to die,' he had said to the king of Abyssinia nearly six years
before, 'and so far from fearing your putting me to death, you would
confer a favour on me, for you would deliver me from all the troubles
and misfortunes which the future may have in store.' Now death _had_
delivered him, yet none the less does his fate lie like a blot on the
men who sent him to his doom, and turned a deaf ear to his prayers for
help until it was too late. England was stricken with horror and grief
at the news, and showed her sorrow in the way which Gordon would have
chosen, not by erecting statues or buildings to his memory, but by
founding schools to help the little orphan boys whom he always loved.
But whatever bitterness may have been in the hearts of his friends
towards those who had sacrificed him, Gordon we can be sure would have
felt none.

'One wants some forgiveness oneself,' he said, when he pardoned Abou
Saoud, who had tried to betray him. 'And it is not a dear article.'

THE CRIME OF THEODOSIUS

Everyone who stops to visit the town of Treves, or Trier, to give it its
German name, must be struck by the number and beauty of its ruins, which
give us some idea of the splendour of the city at the time that Ambrose
the Prefect lived there and ruled his province. About the city were
hills now covered with vines, and through an opening between them ran
the river Moselle. A wall with seven gates defended Treves from the
German tribes on the east of the Rhine, but only one, the Porta Nigra,
or Black Gate, is left standing. Its cathedral, the oldest in Europe
north of the Alps, was founded in 375 A.D. by Valentinian I., who often
occupied the palace which was sacked and ruined a century later by Huns
and Franks. A great bridge spanned the Moselle, and outside the walls,
where the vineyards now climb the hills, was an amphitheatre which held
30,000 people, and when these came back, tired and dusty, from chariot
races or games, there were baths and warm water in the underground
galleries to make them clean and comfortable.

It was somewhere about the year 333 A.D. that a boy was born at Treves
in the house of the governor, and called Ambrose, after his father. He
was the youngest of three children, his brother Sat