ry, and power; but scarcely had they raised the cup of joy to their
lips when it was dashed from them by some stroke of misfortune or
death. The pageant of pride, the tinsel of glory, were not more
lasting than the fantastic castles that are built in the luminous
clouds that hang around the sunset.

At college Louis was called on with his companions to write a thesis
on the downfall of Marius. Nothing more congenial to his convictions
or more encouraging to the deep resolution growing in his heart could
be selected. The picture he drew from the sad history of the
conqueror of the Cimbri was long remembered among his school companions.

Marius was seven times Consul of Rome; in the hapless day of his
ascendancy he threatened to stain three-fourths of the empire with
human blood. Blasted in his golden dream of ambition, driven into
exile by victorious enemies, he was cast by a storm on the shores of
Africa, homeless and friendless; in cold and hunger he sought shelter
amidst the ruins of Carthage. Carthage, whose fallen towers lay in
crumbling masses around him, was once the rival city of imperial Rome
herself, and, under the able leadership of Hannibal, threatened to
wrest from the queen of the Seven Hills the rule of the world. Now
its streets are covered with grass; the wild scream of the bird of
solitude and the moanings of the night-owl mingle with the sobs of
a fallen demigod who once made the earth shake under his tyranny.

Louis read of the facts and sayings that doled out the sad tale of
disappointment felt by those who seemed to possess all that the
wildest ambition could dream of.

"Yesterday the world was not large enough for him," said a sage on the
death of Alexander the Great; "to-day he is content with six feet
of earth."

"What a miserable tomb is erected to the man that once had temples
erected to his honor!" sighed a philosopher on viewing a mean monument
on the sea-shore erected to the great Pompey, who could raise armies
by stamping his feet.

"This is all the great Saladin brings to the grave," was announced by
a courier who carried the great ruler's winding-sheet before him to
the grave.

"Would I had been a poor lay brother," cried out the dying Philip II.
of Spain, "washing the plates in some obscure monastery, rather than
have borne the crown of Spain!"

That which took most effect on the mind of Louis was the eloquence of
Ignatius when he met the young Xavier in the streets of Pa