“When he had availed himself of the permission, which my mother willingly gave him, he said to her, as he placed me on his knee, ‘Madame, when one shows such courage as that at six years of age, there is little danger of his becoming cowardly later on. That mite will some day be a giant.’
“Whether I have become a giant or not,” said the general, relighting his cigar,—“I cannot say, but that which I do know is that in all my military experience I have never striven harder to be brave than I did that day when I was brought face to face with death for the first time.”
After listening to this story, we all of us realized that courage also consists in overcoming fear.
The general was right. This history of a child was at bottom the history of a man. It interested its hearers, and enabled each one of them to make use of it as a lesson for himself. It was not at all a bad preparation for the work of the following morning, which was likely to demand of each of us a great deal more of perseverance, of resolution and presence of mind, than of brilliancy and dash.
Adapted from the French by Adele Bacon.
(“The Second Fear,” of the “Four Fears of Our General,” will be published in the February issue.)
