Possibly the lad too suffered from “pure joy” at that moment, for upon his dismounting his father advanced with the remark that Macedonia was “not big enough for such a son,” that he “must go look for a kingdom to match him.” Which shows that even in the centuries before Christ there was truth in the popular platitude that nothing succeeds like success! Then and there Bucephalus was bought for Alexander, and from that time until its death, from wounds received in a battle fought against the Indian king, Porus, the horse remained Alexander's favourite charger and companion. A remarkable peculiarity about this animal was that though subsequently it came to allow the grooms to ride it bareback, yet when it had on one of the cloths that at that period did duty for a saddle it would allow only Alexander to mount it. As one writer neatly says: “When others tried to mount the horse with the cloth on they invariably had to take to their heels to save themselves from his.” It is further recorded that when Alexander wished to mount, Bucephalus would crouch of its own accord to enable its master to get on more easily. Alexander took Bucephalus with him on his famous expeditions into the East, and on one occasion, in Hyrcania, the horse was stolen. The king “thereupon became terrible to see, so great was his rage.” At once an edict was issued that unless the horse were returned to him without delay he would “carry fire and sword throughout the country—north and south, east and west, sparing neither men nor women, nor, if need be, even the smallest children.” A chronicler of the period, commenting upon this, drily observes that when Alexander's determination became known, “the horse was returned in a hurry!” “Thus,” remarks Arrian, the great historian, “the horse must have been as dear to Alexander as Alexander was terrible to the barbarians.” As he here employs the word “barbarian” in its offensive signification he evidently despised the people of Hyrcania because they had sense enough to return the stolen horse instead of waiting with their kith and kin to be slain or tortured! In the descriptions of almost all the great victories won by Alexander the Great, allusion is made to his favourite steed. We are told by Gellius that in the battle that practically witnessed the death of Bucephalus the king had pressed forward recklessly into the thick of the fight, and apparently right into the enemy's lines, and had thus become “the mark for every spear”—a statement which, if literally true, points to an enemy made up of singularly inept marksmen. “More than one spear,” he goes on, “was buried in the neck and flanks of the horse, but, though at the point of death, and almost drained of blood, he succeeded with a bold dash in carrying the king from the very midst of the foe, and then fell, breathing his last tranquilly now that he knew his master was safe, and as comforted by the knowledge as if he had had the feelings of a human being.”