A year or two after the death of Polycrates, his banished brother Syloson came to the throne in a singular way. During his exile he found himself at Memphis, in Egypt, while Cambyses was there with his conquering army. Among the guards of the king was Darius, the future king of Persia, but then a soldier of little note. Syloson wore a scarlet cloak to which Darius took a fancy and proposed to buy it. By a sudden impulse Syloson replied, "I cannot for any price sell it; but I give it you for nothing, if it must be yours." Darius thanked him for the cloak, and that ended the matter there and then,--Syloson afterwards holding himself as silly for the impulsive good nature of his gift. But at length he learned with surprise that the simple Persian soldier whom he had benefited was now king of the great Persian empire. He went to Susa, the capital, and told who he was. Darius had forgotten his face, but he remembered the incident of the cloak, and offered to pay a kingly price for the small favor of his humbler days, tendering gold and silver in profusion to his visitor. Syloson rejected these, but asked the aid of Darius to make him king of Samos. This the grateful monarch granted, and sent Syloson an army, with whose aid the island quickly and quietly fell into his hands. Yet calamity followed this peaceful conquest. Charilaus, a hot-tempered and half-mad Samian, who had been given charge of the acropolis, broke from it at the head of the guards, and murdered many of the Persian officers who were scattered unguarded throughout the town. The reprisal was dreadful. The Persian army fell in fury on the Samians and slaughtered every man and boy in the island, handing over to Syloson a kingdom of women and infants. Some time afterwards, however, the island was repeopled by men from without, and Syloson completed his reign in peace, leaving the sceptre of Samos to his son. _THE ADVENTURES OF DEMOCEDES._ When Pythagoras, the celebrated Greek philosopher, settled in the ancient Italian city of Crotona (between 550 and 520 B.C.) there was living in that town a youthful surgeon who was destined to have a remarkable history. Democedes by name, the son of a Crotonian named Calliphon, he strongly inclined while still a mere boy to the study of medicine and surgery, for which arts that city had then a reputation higher than any part of Greece.