I had also to confess that the reason given by the people of Hellas for Alexander's abdication from the world seems plausible enough. Even a cursory reading of the history of his last years makes it quite clear that the great conqueror was a disappointed, a disillusioned man. He wept not because--to quote the tag of our schooldays--there were no more worlds to conquer, but for the failure of the great ideal which had inspired his conquest of this one: a union of the races of East and West not only by political fusion but by actual inter-marriage, and an overthrow for good and all of the barbarous fetich which would set the people of either continent necessarily in a position of superiority to the other. It may even be that among ourselves the time will come when this humane ambition is held, more than all his marvellous military adventures, to be his true claim to the title "great." During his life Alexander strove to put the ideal into effect; and history tells us how he failed. His ideas were many centuries ahead of his time; there seems likelihood, indeed, that were he alive now--leaving aside for a moment his supposed reincarnation in the person of the man called Philipson--he would find the world little farther advanced towards a liberal and truly civilised outlook on these questions than in his own day. His generals gave lip-service to the ideal of race-fusion, but it was from mere submission to the will of the king, and without true sympathy or understanding. But that Alexander, despairing of his followers and abandoning the struggle against intolerance, gathered a handful of enlightened spirits and voluntarily disappeared from the known world to found a new kingdom in the unknown, remains to my mind a riddle which written history is incapable of solving. The historians who place his death in Babylon in the year 323 B.C. wrote merely what was currently believed in their day. Mirlees, in the foregoing remarkable narrative, records the belief of a people in the secret interior of Asia that Alexander brought his small band of faithful to that fertile valley in the midst of the eternal snows, where his ideal of blending European with Asiatic blood might be realised without interference from the outer world. It will be noticed, however, that Mirlees does not quote proofs beyond the universal belief of the people of the valley, the inscription on the obelisk, and the statue said to have been by the hand of Dinocrates. Of these, the first two do not appeal to me as strong evidence. Supposing the original settlers were Macedonians, it is quite possible that among their descendants the tradition may have arisen in the course of the centuries that among those who first came to the valley was Alexander himself, and that this tradition finally crystallised into accepted history. Probably, too, it was at some such later date as this that the obelisk recording the tradition was erected: Mirlees, it will