Yet he seemed sometimes able to trust people. Once, when he was sick, word came to him that his physician had been bribed to poison him. When his next dose of medicine was ready, Alexander laid the letter which told this story, before his friend, the physician, then drank the medicine, to show how fully he trusted him. Before he was thirty-three years old this wonderful, sad life was ended! I do not know anything sadder than a great, bad man. I cannot help wondering how it would have been if Alexander had lived about three hundred years later, and met Jesus Christ. Yet he might have known Jesus as Abraham did, and David, and Samuel, and all that long list of great men. The story of his last sickness is very dreadful. It seemed to have been brought on by his awful grief over the death of a friend. But he had such a strange way of grieving! All night he would spend in drinking liquor, and all day he lay and slept off its effects. But one morning he found himself unable to rise, and he never rose again. When he was asked who should succeed him as ruler of the kingdom, he said, "the strongest." But he gave his signet ring to one of his generals named Perdiccas. So closed this great _little_ life. The greatest soldier who ever lived, as men talk about soldiers, but an utter failure in the sight of him who said: "He that ruleth his own spirit, is greater than he that taketh a city." CHAPTER II. ADDISON, JOSEPH. When I was a little girl, I sat listening one day while several gentlemen who were visiting my father, talked together, and one of them told a queer story which interested me very much, and called forth bursts of laughter from the gentlemen. Then, one said, "That is almost equal to Addison's time." Over this sentence I puzzled. The only person whom I knew by that name was an old lame man who lived at the lower end of a long straggling street, and who was not remarkable for anything but laziness. What could the gentlemen who were visiting my father know about him, and what did they mean by "Addison's time?" I hovered around my father for quite a while, looking for a chance to ask questions, but there was no break in the conversation, so I gave it up. Something recalled the matter to me during the afternoon, and I asked a boy who lived near us, and with whom I was on quite friendly terms, if old Joe Addison had a clock that was queer; explaining to him at the same time why I wanted to know. He replied that he had seen a very large and very ugly-looking watch hanging in the shoe shop by old Joe's bench, and that Joe called it his turnip, and could take the outside casing all off, just as one could take a thing out of a box. This then was the explanation, I thought, but though we talked it over very thoroughly, we failed to see any connection between the story that the gentlemen had laughed over, and old Joe Addison's watch.