A Book of Golden Deeds | Page 9

have any ten years left so lasting a trace upon the
history of the world as those of his career.
It is not, however, of his victories that we are here to speak, but of his
return march from the banks of the Indus, in BC 326, when he had
newly recovered from the severe wound which he had received under
the fig tree, within the mud wall of the city of the Malli. This
expedition was as much the expedition of a discoverer as the journey of
a conqueror: and, at the mouth of the Indus, he sent his ships to survey

the coasts of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, while he himself
marched along the shore of the province, then called Gedrosia, and now
Mekhran. It was a most dismal tract. Above towered mountains of
reddish- brown bare stone, treeless and without verdure, the scanty
grass produced in the summer being burnt up long before September,
the month of his march; and all the slope below was equally desolate
slopes of gravel. The few inhabitants were called by the Greeks
fish-eaters and turtle-eaters, because there was apparently, nothing else
to eat; and their huts were built of turtle shells.
The recollections connected with the region were dismal. Semiramis
and Cyrus were each said to have lost an army there through hunger
and thirst; and these foes, the most fatal foes of the invader, began to
attack the Greek host. Nothing but the discipline and all-pervading
influence of Alexander could have borne his army through. Speed was
their sole chance; and through the burning sun, over the arid rock, he
stimulated their steps with his own high spirit of unshrinking endurance,
till he had dragged them through one of the most rapid and
extraordinary marches of his wonderful career. His own share in their
privations was fully and freely taken; and once when, like the rest, he
was faint with heat and deadly thirst, a small quantity of water, won
with great fatigue and difficulty, was brought to him, he esteemed it too
precious to be applied to his own refreshment, but poured it forth as a
libation, lest, he said, his warriors should thirst the more when they saw
him drink alone; and, no doubt, too, because he felt the exceeding value
of that which was purchased by loyal love. A like story is told of
Rodolf of Hapsburgh, the founder of the greatness of Austria, and one
of the most open-hearted of men. A flagon of water was brought to him
when his army was suffering from severe drought. 'I cannot,' he said,
'drink alone, nor can all share so small a quantity. I do not thirst for
myself, but for my whole army.'
Yet there have been thirsty lips that have made a still more trying
renunciation. Our own Sir Philip Sidney, riding back, with the mortal
hurt in his broken thigh, from the fight at Zutphen, and giving the
draught from his own lips to the dying man whose necessities were
greater than his own, has long been our proverb for the giver of that
self-denying cup of water that shall by no means lose its reward.
A tradition of an act of somewhat the same character survived in a

Slesvig family, now extinct. It was during the wars that ranged from
1652 to 1660, between Frederick III of Denmark and Charles Gustavus
of Sweden, that, after a battle, in which the victory had remained with
the Danes, a stout burgher of Flensborg was about to refresh himself,
ere retiring to have his wounds dressed, with a draught of beer from a
wooden bottle, when an imploring cry from a wounded Swede, lying
on the field, made him turn, and, with the very words of Sidney, 'Thy
need is greater than mine,' he knelt down by the fallen enemy, to pour
the liquor into his mouth. His requital was a pistol shot in the shoulder
from the treacherous Swede. 'Rascal,' he cried, 'I would have
befriended you, and you would murder me in return! Now I will punish
you. I would have given you the whole bottle; but now you shall have
only half.' And drinking off half himself, he gave the rest to the Swede.
The king, hearing the story, sent for the burgher, and asked him how he
came to spare the life of such a rascal.
'Sire,' said the honest burgher, 'I could never kill a wounded enemy.'
'Thou meritest to be a noble,' the king said, and created him one
immediately, giving him as armorial bearings a wooden bottle pierced
with an arrow! The family only lately became extinct in the person of
an old maiden lady.

HOW ONE MAN HAS SAVED A HOST
B.C. 507

There have been times