The generous knight instantly pushed the cup toward the dying soldier, saying, “Give it to him. His need is greater than mine.”
Sir Philip Sidney died of this wound, when he was only thirty-two years of age. On the day of his funeral in Saint Paul’s Cathedral the rich and poor, high and low, all felt they had lost a friend, and mourned for him as the kindest, gentlest man that they had ever known. His kindness to the dying soldier has caused his name to be remembered ever since with admiration and affection, and as long as stories of noble deeds are told to future boys and girls, this story will never be forgotten.
It is thought that Shakespeare, who settled in London while all the world was talking of Sidney’s life and its heroic ending, had him in mind when he made Ophelia speak of Hamlet as
The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, and sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers.
10. THE BELL OF JUSTICE
Long ago in Italy a king ordered a bell hung from a tower in the market-place and called it “The Bell of Justice.” He said even if a little child suffered any wrong, he could ring the bell by pulling on the rope that was fastened to it, and the little child should receive justice. As the years passed many wrongs of the people were righted for the people who rang the bell. But at last the lower part of the rope rotted away, and a wild grape-vine was tied to lengthen it. On the hillside above the village lived a man who owned a horse that he allowed to roam on the roadside, and that he left to starve and to die in his old age, because the owner was too miserly to feed him. One day the horse wandered into the market-place, and seeing the green grape-vine, the poor creature in the keen pangs of hunger began to eat it, and in doing so rang the bell. All the people heard the ringing. It seemed to say,
Some-one-has-done-me-a-wrong!