spring and ever-during fortune. Were a professional man to
lose his fortune, he need not feel regret, for his knowledge is of
itself a mine of wealth. Wherever he may sojourn the learned man will
meet respect, and be ushered into the upper seat, whilst the ignorant
man must put up with offal and suffer want:--If thou covet the paternal
heritage, acquire thy father's knowledge, for this thy father's wealth
thou may'st squander in ten days. After having been in authority, it is
hard to obey; after having been fondled with caresses, to put up with
men's violence:--There once occurred an insurrection in Syria, and
everybody forsook his former peaceful abode. The sons of peasants, who
were men of learning, came to be employed as the ministers of kings; and
the children of noblemen, of bankrupt understandings, went a begging
from village to village."

III

A certain learned man was superintending the education of a king's son;
and he was chastising him without mercy, and reproving him with
asperity. The boy, out of all patience, complained to the king his
father, and laid bare before him his much-bruised body. The king was
much offended, and sending for the master, said: "You do not treat the
children of my meanest subject with the harshness and cruelty you do my
boy; what do you mean by this?" He replied: "To think before they speak,
and to deliberate before they act, are duties incumbent upon all
mankind, and more immediately upon kings; because whatever may drop from
their hands and tongue, the special deed or word will somehow become the
subject of public animadversion; whereas any act or remark of the
commonalty attracts not such notice:--Let a dervish, or poor man, commit
a hundred indiscretions, and his companions will not notice one out of
the hundred; and let a king but utter one foolish word, and it will be
echoed from kingdom to kingdom:--therefore in forming the morals of
young princes, more pains are to be taken than with the sons of the
vulgar. Whoever was not taught good manners in his boyhood, fortune will
forsake him when he becomes a man. Thou may'st bend the green bough as
thou likest; but let it once get dry, and it will require heat to
straighten it:--'_Verily thou may'st bend the tender branch, but it were
labor lost to attempt making straight a crooked billet_.'"

The king greatly approved of this ingenious detail, and the wholesome
course of discipline of the learned doctor; and, bestowing upon him