esus too, how is he?
and what are my wives about? They'll soon have a new companion. To-morrow
I intend to sue for the hand of Oroetes' pretty daughter. We've talked a
good deal of love with our eyes already. I don't know whether we spoke
Persian or Syrian, but we said the most charming things to one another."

The friends laughed, and Darius, joining in their merriment, said: "Now
you shall hear a piece of very good news. I have kept it to the last,
because it is the best I have. Now, Bartja, prick up your ears. Your
mother, the noble Kassandane, has been cured of her blindness! Yes, yes,
it is quite true.--Who cured her? Why who should it be, but that crabbed
old Nebenchari, who has become, if possible, moodier than ever. Come,
now, calm yourselves, and let me go on with my story; or it will be
morning before Bartja gets to sleep. Indeed. I think we had better
separate now: you've heard the best, and have something to dream about
What, you will not? Then, in the name of Mithras, I must go on, though it
should make my heart bleed.

"I'll begin with the king. As long as Phanes was in Babylon, he seemed to
forget his grief for Nitetis.

"The Athenian was never allowed to leave him. They were as inseparable as
Reksch and Rustem. Cambyses had no time to think of his sorrow, for
Phanes had always some new idea or other, and entertained us all, as well
as the king, marvellously. And we all liked him too; perhaps, because no
one could really envy him. Whenever he was alone, the tears came into his
eyes at the thought of his boy, and this made his great cheerfulness--a
cheerfulness which he always managed to impart to the king, Bartja,--the
more admirable. Every morning he went down to the Euphrates with Cambyses
and the rest of us, and enjoyed watching the sons of the Achaemenidae at
their exercises. When he saw them riding at full speed past the
sand-hills and shooting the pots placed on them into fragments with their
arrows, or throwing blocks of wood at one another and cleverly evading
the blows, he confessed that he could not imitate them in these
exercises, but at the same time he offered to accept a challenge from any
of us in throwing the spear and in wrestling. In his quick way he sprang
from his horse, stripped off his clothes--it was really a shame--and, to
the delight of the boys, threw their wrestling-master as if he had been a
feather.

[In the East, nudity was, even in those days, held to be
disgracefu