ts. Without waiting for his men, Butler went to the place
where the crowd was most dense, overturned an ash barrel, stood upon
it, and began: "Delegates from Five Points, fiends from hell, you have
murdered your superiors," and the blood-stained crowd quailed before
the courageous words of a single man in a city which Mayor Fernando
Wood could not restrain with the aid of police and militia.

"Our enemies are before us," exclaimed the Spartans at Thermopylae.
"And we are before them," was the cool reply of Leonidas. "Deliver
your arms," came the message from Xerxes. "Come and take them," was
the answer Leonidas sent back. A Persian soldier said: "You will not
be able to see the sun for flying javelins and arrows." "Then we will
fight in the shade," replied a Lacedemonian. What wonder that a
handful of such men checked the march of the greatest host that ever
trod the earth.

"It is impossible," said a staff officer, when Napoleon gave directions
for a daring plan. "Impossible!" thundered the great commander,
"_impossible_ is the adjective of fools!" Napoleon went to the edge of
his possibility.

Grant never knew when he was beaten. When told that he was surrounded
by the enemy at Belmont, he quietly replied: "Well, then we must cut
our way out."

The courageous man is an example to the intrepid. His influence is
magnetic. He creates an epidemic of nobleness. Men follow him, even
to the death.

The spirit of courage will transform the whole temper of your life.
"The wise and active conquer difficulties by daring to attempt them.
Sloth and folly shiver and sicken at the sight of trial and hazard, and
make the impossibility they fear."

"The hero," says Emerson, "is the man who is immovably centred."

Emin Pasha, the explorer of Africa, was left behind by his exploring
party under circumstances that were thought certainly fatal, and his
death was reported with great assurance. Early the next winter, as his
troop was on its toilsome but exciting way through Central Africa, it
came upon a most wretched sight. A party of natives had been kidnapped
by the slave-hunters, and dragged in chains thus far toward the land of
bondage. But small-pox had set in, and the miserable company had been
abandoned to their fate. Emin sent his men ahead, and stayed behind in
this camp of death to act as physician and nurse. How many lives he
saved is not known, though it is known that he nearly lost his own.
The age of