There are other wonders connected with this event, about which we can only say that great historians have related them. For our own parts, we are not so sceptical regarding the remote events of history as some readers and authors are. We see, constantly, matters that must some day belong to history, put in as false a light by the passions and interests of contemporaries, as if they were viewed through the mist of past ages. Again, that which is wonderful is not necessarily untrue. When Marco Paolo returned from his long pilgrimage, his accounts were all received as fables; now, almost all of them prove to be bare truth. We shall never reject a story told by a respectable historian, on account of its being a little miraculous, provided it be amusing, instructive, and elevating, and at the same time a thing with which well-educated youth ought to be acquainted. The only son Crœsus had living was dumb. This young prince, seeing a soldier about to cut down the king, whom he did not know, with his scimitar, made such a violent effort to save his father’s life, that he broke the string which had confined his tongue, and cried out,--“Soldier! spare the life of Crœsus!” The account of Cyrus’s conversation, given above, is from Xenophon’s Cyropædia; the following, which greatly differs from the circumstances attending it, is from Herodotus.--How are we to choose? The Cyropædia is by some writers looked upon as little more than a romance; and Herodotus abounds in apocryphal stories.