ught but gentle words. It
is best as it is. He has been very sorry himself for the child, and
Mandane's reproaches had gone to his heart. "Let Harpagus go home and
send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince. To-night there
will be great sacrifices in honour of the child's safety, and Harpagus is
to be a guest at the banquet."

Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the
king's meat? He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put
before him, out of which he is to take--in Median fashion--what he likes.
He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son. Like a true
Eastern he shows no signs of horror. The king asks him if he knew what
flesh he had been eating. He answers that he knew perfectly. That
whatever the king did pleased him.

Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive,
and bided his time. The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his
dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus--as we must now call the foundling
prince--had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let
to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life. But Harpagus does
not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. He has wrongs to
avenge on his grandfather. And it seems not altogether impossible to the
young mountaineer.

He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge
in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his
eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all
his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.

He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an
Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to
avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the Persians had no
cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king,
keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a
single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.

And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer and
his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward
towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian
cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to
them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe
whom they overcome. They knit these t