But admitting the existence of the Greek-descended race to be possible, one comes to the real strain to credence when Mirlees goes on to say that this nation had been founded by Alexander the Great _in person_. I am open to admit that I was at first disposed to put aside this notion as the merest, wildest legend, unsupported by historic fact or even probability. After a while, however, it began to appeal to me with a peculiar fascination, which deepened the more I pondered over it. I became interested. I ordered in books for which the stores of our far corner of the world were seldom troubled and had to keep me waiting long. They arrived at last, however, those tomes of ancient history, and I devoured every word that has come down to us regarding the last years and the last hours of the great conqueror; yet nowhere in any authentic record was I able to find one fact by which the claims of this lost race of Hellas could be disproved. To their theory of Alexander's "death," history itself would seem if anything to lend colour. We know that there has been down through the ages an uneasy, vague feeling that the fever which was supposed to have carried him off was insufficient to account satisfactorily for his end; that long after the event there persisted a widespread suspicion that the real cause was poison. We know that the conqueror's features were remarkably like those of his friend Hephaistion, and from this may reasonably assume that his was a type of personal beauty not uncommon among the Macedonians who followed him into Asia. It is tolerably well vouched for, too, that the commanders of his army were at the time engrossed one and all in their own greedy designs on the empire; they _wished_ Alexander dead, and seeing that no live Alexander came forward to refute the story of the dead one, it would hardly have occurred to them to stop and verify that the body on the royal bier was really Alexander's and not that of a "double" from among his own comely Greeks.