ould confide to make the observation.
The herdsman exhibited the dead child to him, and he was satisfied. He
reported the result of his mission to Harpagus, and Harpagus then
ordered the body to be buried. The child of Mandane, whom we may call
Cyrus, since that was the name which he subsequently received, was
brought up in the herdsman's hut, and passed every where for Spaco's
child.

Harpagus, after receiving the report of his messenger, then informed
Astyages that his orders had been executed, and that the child was
dead. A trusty messenger, he said, whom he had sent for the purpose,
had seen the body. Although the king had been so earnest to have the
deed performed, he found that, after all, the knowledge that his
orders had been obeyed gave him very little satisfaction. The fears,
prompted by his selfishness and ambition, which had led him to commit
the crime, gave place, when it had been perpetrated, to remorse for
his unnatural cruelty. Mandane mourned incessantly the death of her
innocent babe, and loaded her father with reproaches for having
destroyed it, which he found it very hard to bear. In the end, he
repented bitterly of what he had done.

The secret of the child's preservation remained concealed for about
ten years. It was then discovered in the following manner:

Cyrus, like Alexander, Caesar, William the Conqueror, Napoleon, and
other commanding minds, who obtained a great ascendancy over masses of
men in their maturer years, evinced his dawning superiority at a very
early period of his boyhood. He took the lead of his playmates in
their sports, and made them submit to his regulations and decisions.
Not only did the peasants' boys in the little hamlet where his reputed
father lived thus yield the precedence to him, but sometimes, when the
sons of men of rank and station came out from the city to join them
in their plays, even then Cyrus was the acknowledged head. One day the
son of an officer of King Astyages's court--his father's name was
Artembaris--came out, with other boys from the city, to join these
village boys in their sports. They were playing _king_. Cyrus was the
king. Herodotus says that the other boys _chose_ him as such. It was,
however, probably such a sort of choice as that by which kings and
emperors are made among men, a yielding more or less voluntary on the
part of the subjects to the resolute and determined energy with which
the aspirant places himself upon the throne.

During