rows at his back.

Those were great times when the King came to Stagira!

When the King went back to the capital everybody received presents, and
the good doctor, by some chance, was treated best of all, and little
Aristo came in for the finest bow that ever was, all tipped with silver
and eagle-feathers. But the bow did not bring good luck, for soon after,
the boy's father was caught in an avalanche of sliding stone and crushed
to death.

Aristo was taken in charge by Proxenus, a near kinsman. The lad was so
active at climbing, so full of life and energy and good spirits, that
when the King came the next year to Stagira, he asked for Aristo. With
the King was his son Philip, a lad about the age of Aristo, but not so
tall nor so active. The boys became fast friends, and once when a
stranger saw them together he complimented the King on his fine,
intelligent boys, and the King had to explain, "The other boy is
mine--but I wish they both were."

Aristo knew where the wild boars fed in gulches, and where the stunted
oaks grew close and thick. Higher up in the mountains there were bears,
which occasionally came down and made the wild pigs scamper. You could
always tell when the bears were around, for then the little pigs would
run out into the open. The bears had a liking for little pigs, and the
bears had a liking for the honey in the bee-trees, too. Aristo could
find the bee-trees better than the bears--all you had to do was to watch
the flight of the bees as they left the clover.

Then there were deer--you could see their tracks any time around the
mountain marshes where the springs gushed forth and the watercress grew
lush. Still higher up the mountains, beyond where bears ever traveled,
there were mountain-sheep, and still higher up were goats. The goats
were so wild that hardly any one but Aristo had ever seen them, but he
knew they were there.

The King was delighted to have such a lad as companion for his son, and
insisted that he should go back to the capital with them and become a
member of the Court.

Not he--there were other ambitions. He wanted to go to Athens and study
at the school of Plato--Plato, the pupil of the great Socrates.

The King laughed--he had never heard of Plato. That a youth should
refuse to become part of the Macedonian Court, preferring the company of
an unknown school-master, was amusing--he laughed.

The next year when the King came back to Stagira, Aristo was still
there. "And