to comfort
and relieve him. In an hour she was, as it were, herself his mother,
and she began to plead hard with her husband for his life.

Mitridates said that the child could not possibly be saved. Harpagus
had been most earnest and positive in his orders, and he was coming
himself to see that they had been executed. He would demand,
undoubtedly, to see the body of the child, to assure himself that it
was actually dead. Spaco, instead of being convinced by her husband's
reasoning, only became more and more earnest in her desires that the
child might be saved. She rose from her couch and clasped her
husband's knees, and begged him with the most earnest entreaties and
with many tears to grant her request. Her husband was, however,
inexorable. He said that if he were to yield, and attempt to save
the child from its doom, Harpagus would most certainly know that
his orders had been disobeyed, and then their own lives would be
forfeited, and the child itself sacrificed after all, in the end.

The thought then occurred to Spaco that her own dead child might be
substituted for the living one, and be exposed in the mountains in
its stead. She proposed this plan, and, after much anxious doubt and
hesitation, the herdsman consented to adopt it. They took off the
splendid robes which adorned the living child, and put them on the
corpse, each equally unconscious of the change. The little limbs of
the son of Mandane were then more simply clothed in the coarse and
scanty covering which belonged to the new character which he was now
to assume, and then the babe was restored to its place in Spaco's
bosom. Mitridates placed his own dead child, completely disguised as
it was by the royal robes it wore, in the little basket or cradle in
which the other had been brought, and, accompanied by an attendant,
whom he was to leave in the forest to keep watch over the body, he
went away to seek some wild and desolate solitude in which to leave
it exposed.

[Illustration: THE EXPOSURE OF THE INFANT.]

Three days passed away, during which the attendant whom the herdsman
had left in the forest watched near the body to prevent its being
devoured by wild beasts or birds of prey, and at the end of that time
he brought it home. The herdsman then went to Harpagus to inform him
that the child was dead, and, in proof that it was really so, he said
that if Harpagus would come to his hut he could see the body. Harpagus
sent some messenger in whom he c