pleased himself with these sights
for a while, and then went back to the garden and hid himself from the
gardeners and passed the night. Next morning he put on the appearance
of a madman and wandered about till he came to a lawn where several
pert-faced girls were amusing themselves. On a throne, jewelled and
overspread with silken stuffs, sat a girl the splendour of whose beauty
lighted up the place, and whose ambergris and attar perfumed the whole
air. 'That must be Mihrafruz,' he thought, 'she is indeed lovely.' Just
then one of the attendants came to the water's edge to fill a cup, and
though the prince was in hiding, his face was reflected in the water.
When she saw this image she was frightened, and let her cup fall into
the stream, and thought, 'Is it an angel, or a peri, or a man?' Fear and
trembling took hold of her, and she screamed as women scream. Then some
of the other girls came and took her to the princess who asked: 'What is
the matter, pretty one?'

'O princess! I went for water, and I saw an image, and I was afraid.'
So another girl went to the water and saw the same thing, and came back
with the same story. The princess wished to see for herself; she rose
and paced to the spot with the march of a prancing peacock. When she
saw the image she said to her nurse: 'Find out who is reflected in
the water, and where he lives.' Her words reached the prince's ear, he
lifted up his head; she saw him and beheld beauty such as she had never
seen before. She lost a hundred hearts to him, and signed to her nurse
to bring him to her presence. The prince let himself be persuaded to go
with the nurse, but when the princess questioned him as to who he was
and how he had got into her garden, he behaved like a man out of his
mind--sometimes smiling, sometimes crying, and saying: 'I am hungry,'Or
words misplaced and random, civil mixed with the rude.

'What a pity!' said the princess, 'he is mad!' As she liked him she
said: 'He is my madman; let no one hurt him.' She took him to her house
and told him not to go away, for that she would provide for all his
wants. The prince thought, 'It would be excellent if here, in her very
house, I could get the answer to her riddle; but I must be silent, on
pain of death.'

Now in the princess's household there was a girl called Dil-aram [7];
she it was who had first seen the image of the prince. She came to love
him very much, and she spent day and night thinking how she could make