CHARACTER - The Grandest Thing in the World. Orison Swett Marden

for an hour and a half, as did the Confederates. During this whole time the boy in gray went over the entire battlefield, giving drink to the thirsty, straightening cramped and mangled limbs, putting knapsacks under the heads of sufferers, spreading coats and blankets as if they had been his own comrades.

      General Gordon is said to have had a great number of medals for which he cared nothing. There was a gold one, however, given to him by the Empress of China, with a special inscription engraved upon it, for which he had a great liking. But it suddenly disappeared; no one knew where or how. Years afterwards it was found out, by a curious accident, that Gordon had erased the inscription, sold the medal for ten pounds, and sent the sum anonymously for the relief of the sufferers from the cotton famine at Manchester.

      There is one anecdote—matchless if not incredible. It reads like a fable out of the Orient. It relates to a Spanish Moor, whose walk in his garden was interrupted by the inrush of a Spanish cavalier who flung himself at his feet and implored protection, saying that the pursuers were seeking his life for having slain a Moor. Refuge was promised in the garden summer-house till midnight. Unlocking the door at the appointed hour, the Moor said: “You have killed my only son. But I pledged my word not to betray you.” And he placed the murderer upon a mule, saying, “Flee while darkness conceals you. God is just; my faith is unspotted, and I have resigned judgment to him.”

      Yet, unless it is true that a pledge is sacred, the pillars of heaven may fall. Unless generosity of spirit prevails among men there can never be upon earth an ideal life.

      “The last, best fruit,” says Richter, “which comes to late perfection even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, philanthropy toward the misanthropic.”

      As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes, and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a while the whole sea is there and beyond it; so now and then there comes a man head and shoulders above his fellow-men, showing that Nature has not lost her ideal of great-heartedness, and after a while even the average man will overtop the highest wave of noble manhood yet given to the world.