Cassander. While he was fighting in southern Greece, she gathered an army in northern Greece and attempted to invade Macedon and get possession of its capital city, Pella. But Cassander was a shrewd young general; he seized all the ships he could get together and sailed up the Ægean Sea so quickly that before Olympias knew it he had landed his army and got between her and the road that led to Pella. Thereupon the old Princess, being afraid to risk a battle, shut herself up with her slender army and the little Alexander and his mother in the city of Pydna, an old town of Macedon lying at the head of what is now called, on your map of Turkey in Europe, the Gulf of Salonica. It is in the walled town of Pydna that, in the year 316 b.c., we get our second brief glimpse of the son of Alexander, now a little boy of seven.

It was a beautiful spot in which that old town of Pydna was built; it stood three miles from the sea, in a fair and fertile region, and almost in the shadow of that grand old hill Mount Olympus, the home of the gods of Greece.

It was anything but a beautiful home for little King Alexander, however, when he found himself locked behind its thick walls. For Cassander, the Macedonian, marched his soldiers against it, and dug a great trench all around it, and set up all the dreadful old-time war-engines about it, and determined either to batter down its walls or starve out its inhabitants.

It was a terrible siege. Provisions gave out, and poor little Alexander went to bed hungry many a night. The horses, the mules, and the dogs were killed for food. The great war-elephants, having nothing to eat but sawdust, grew too weak to be of any use, and, with their useless drivers, were killed and eaten by the soldiers.

One dark night, through a secret doorway in the city wall, a little party crept softly out of Pydna and went down toward the port. It was the Princess Olympias, with the little King and his mother, accompanied by a few followers. Grown desperate by failure and famine, they had planned to escape on a swift galley which was waiting for them in the harbor. Silently they moved forward, but before they had gone a mile a breathless messenger met them. "Back, back to the city," he cried; "back ere you are all made prisoners! Cassander has discovered your plan. The galley is captured, and men lie in wait at the port to seize and slay you all."

Hurriedly the fugitives returned to the city. Then, unable longer to stand the horrors and privations of a besieged town, Olympias the Princess and little King Alexander, her grandson, surrendered to Cassander, after getting him to promise to do them no harm.

But those were days when such promises did not amount to much. For the lying Cassander speedily went back upon all his promises. He had the ambitious old Princess killed, and he imprisoned Alexander and his mother in the gloomy old citadel at Amphipolis, an important city of Macedon, on the river Strymon, three miles back from the sea, at the head of what is now called, on your map of Turkey in Europe, the Gulf of Orfani.

Here in this massive and gloomy old citadel of Amphipolis ("the city surrounded by water"), where the boy was kept close prisoner for five years, we get our last glimpse of the son of Alexander. For when Cassander learned that there was a movement on foot to set the young King free and make him King indeed, he sent to Glaucius, the commander of the citadel, a swift messenger bearing a fearful message. It was an order to make away with Alexander and his mother as speedily and as secretly as possible.

The dreadful work was done. How, when, or where none knows to this day. The "taking off" of the thirteen-year-old King of Macedon was as great a tragedy and as complete a mystery as was the murder of the English Princes in the Tower of London eighteen hundred years later.

So the last of the race of Alexander was cut off. Cassander and the generals made themselves kings, and the Macedonians held sway in the East until the growing power of Rome overshadowed and absorbed all that was left of the once mighty empire of Alexander the Great.

It is evident that the son of the conqueror possessed little of the pluck and spirit of his famous father, who was a governor at fourteen, a general at sixteen, a king at eighteen, a conqueror at twenty. The strength of his father's name was great, and had the little Alexander been of equal valor he might have changed the history of the world.

But he did not. The life that began in glitter and glory in the splendid palace at Babylon, tasted privation and misery behind the gates of Pydna, and went out in secrecy and death in the grim dungeons of Amphipolis.

It is a sad story, but the son of Alexander was not the only "sad little prince" in the history of the world. His story is simply more notable, and perhaps more pathetic, than that of other unfortunate boys because of the greatness and splendor of his father's name, and because not even the shadow of that mighty name could save from sorrow, pain, and death the short young life that should rather have been full of pleasure and of promise, and should have made itself a power in the union of races and the history of the world.

COBWEB LANE.

BY FRANKLIN MATTHEWS.

The most curious and interesting highway that I know of is Cobweb Lane, and I very much doubt if any of my readers ever heard of it. I am sure, however, that some of them have been in it in the daytime, but strangely enough they have never seen it, for the peculiar reason that Cobweb Lane doesn't exist in the daytime. It only exists at night. It isn't some out-of-the-way and quaint place in London, as, at first thought, its name might indicate, but it is in the most conspicuous place in Greater New York. I'll let you into the secret—I am quite sure it is a secret with me—and tell you where it is and what it is.

Cobweb Lane is nothing more nor less than the promenade on the Brooklyn Bridge. It doesn't exist until after midnight, because not until then do the strands that hang from the big cables resemble the huge cobwebs that have suggested the name Cobweb Lane. The moon has to be in just the right position; the great cities of New York and Brooklyn must have gone to bed and left numerous lights, some in full glare and some turned down; the water in the river below must have a thin veil of mist hanging over it, and then, in the stillness of the night, if you will walk over the bridge you will see Cobweb Lane.

YOU ARE NOW AT THE BEGINNING OF COBWEB LANE.

There is East Cobweb Lane and West Cobweb Lane. The first is on the Brooklyn side of the bridge and the other is on the New York side. As you walk out on the promenade and look over the cities and the beautiful harbor, perhaps you soon will turn your eyes to the top of one of the towers as you approach it. You are now at the beginning of Cobweb Lane. The four big cables curve down from the top and hide themselves in some masonry at your feet, and when you look up the narrow spaces between them, as they reach away before you, the eye catches sight of strands of steel rope, woven regularly and gracefully, hanging from the cables and extending to the structure on which you are standing. These strands, when the moon shines just right, partly obscured and lying low in the south, are like the filmy threads of a monster cobweb spun in the sky.

Just as you are entranced with this fairy picture, and are wondering where the big spider must be, you look ahead of you on the promenade, and, as if coming from some hidden passage, you see a cloud of vapor. There is something approaching, surely. You wonder at once if the spider that could