[Illustration: The giant bird did not seem to notice its burden
at all. (_Page 274_).]

The Princess of the Tower

I

Princess Solima was sick, not exactly ill, but so much out of sorts
that her father, King Zuliman, was both annoyed and perturbed. The
princess was as beautiful as a princess of those days should be; her
long tresses were like threads of gold, her blue eyes rivaled the
color of the sky on the balmiest summer day; and her smile was as
radiant as the sunshine itself.

She was learned and clever, too, and her goodness of heart gained for
her as great a renown as her peerless beauty. Despite all this,
Princess Solima was not happy. Indeed, she was wretched to
despondency, and her melancholy weighed heavily upon her father.

"What ails you, my precious daughter?" he asked her a hundred times,
but she made no answer.

She just sat and silently moped. She did not waste away, which puzzled
the physicians; she did not grow pale, which surprised her
attendants; and she did not weep, which astonished herself. But she
felt as if her heart had grown heavy, as if there was no use in
anything.

The king squared his shoulders to show his determination and summoned
his magicians and wizards and sorcerers and commanded them to perform
their arts and solve the mystery of the illness of Princess Solima. A
strange crew they were, ranged in a semi-circle before the king. There
was the renowned astrologer from Egypt, a little man with a humpback;
the mixer of mysterious potions from China, a long, lank yellow man,
with tiny eyes; the alchemist from Arabia, a scowling man with his
face almost concealed by whiskers; there was a Greek and a Persian and
a Phoenician, each with some special knowledge and fearfully anxious
to display it. They set to work.

One studied the stars, another concocted a sweet-smelling fluid, a
third retired to the woods and thought deeply, a fourth made abstruse
calculations with diagrams and figures, a fifth questioned the
princess' handmaidens, and a sixth conceived the brilliant notion of
talking with the princess herself. He was certainly an original
wizard, and he learned more than all the others.

Then they met in consultation and talked foreign languages and
pretended very seriously to understand one another. One said the stars
were in opposition, another said he had gazed into a crystal and had
seen a glow-worm chasing a hippopotamus which a third interpreted as
meaning th