whispered in his ear. "Bad writing is never forgiven."

So, as if in a prophecy of the future, Napoleon suffered unjust disgrace
in connection with Saint Helena's name; and to-day, in the splendid
exhibition-room of the historical library at Florence, jealously guarded
beneath a glass case, is Napoleon's blue paper copybook, the very last
line of which reads, by the strangest of all strange coincidences,
"Saint Helena, a little island."

The boy's willingness to suffer for his friends, and, even more than
this, the unjust taking away of his office in the school battalion, of
which he was quite proud, turned the tide in young Napoleon's favor, so
far as his schoolmates were concerned.

"Little Straw-nose is a plucky one, is he not, though?" the boys
declared; and when he came on the field again, they welcomed him with
cheers, and made him leader for the day in their sports.

They had great fun. Napoleon, full of his readings in Plutarch's
"Lives," divided the boys into two camps; one camp was to be the
Persians, the other the Greeks and Macedonians. Napoleon, of course, was
Alexander; and, like the great Macedonian, he wrought such havoc on the
Persians, that the school hall in which the battle was waged was filled
with the uproar, and all the teachers at Brienne rushed pell-mell to the
place, to quell what they were certain must be a school riot, led on by
"that miserable Corsican."

Day by day, however, "that miserable Corsican" made more and more
friends among his schoolfellows. For boys grow tired at last of plaguing
one who has both spirit and pluck; and these Napoleon certainly