PREFACE It would be pleasant indeed to gather the characters of this book together and listen to the conversation of wholly different but interested couples—for this is a book of contrasts and has been written as such. Lives of the most dramatic and adventurous quality have been gathered from all corners of the earth, and from every age in history, in such a way that they may cover the widest possible variety of human experience. The publishers believe that such a book would not be complete with

  CHAPTER XXXII WILLIAM TELL Many hundreds of years ago, at the end of the Thirteenth Century to be exact, in the country that is now Switzerland, there lived a Swiss hunter and herdsman named William Tell. He lived in the little town of Burglen among the mountains, and with him lived his wife and his two sons, who, when this story opens, were about ten and twelve years old. William Tell was so strong that his name was known far and wide; he was so skilful a hunter that nothing seemed ever to es