ad she to live? The spirit answered nothing.

"And how shall I die?" asked the woman.

The Sultan shivered at this senseless question, and would have made
the girl withdraw; but, in an instant, the pen had written out the
answer, "Thou shalt be killed."

The woman grew as pale as a wax figure, and stammered, "Who will kill
me?"

Both of them awaited in terror and with baited breath what the pen
would answer, and the pen, taking good care not to form a single
illegible letter, wrote on the parchment, "Mahmoud!"

The favorite fell unconscious into the arms of the Sultan, who,
carrying her away, laid her on the divan, watching over her till she
came to herself again, and then comforting her with wise saws.

An evil, mocking spirit dwelt in the reed, he said, consolingly, who
only uttered its forebodings to agitate their hearts. "Did it not say
also that I should love thee to the death? How then could I slay thee?
A lying spirit dwelleth in that reed!"

And yet the Sultan himself was trembling all the time.

That night no sleep visited his eyes, and early in the morning he took
the reed from his favorite by force, telling her that he was going to
throw it into the fire.

But he did _not_ throw it into the fire. On the contrary, the Sultan
frequently produced it, and, inasmuch as he sometimes convicted the
spirit of a false prophecy, he began to regard the whole thing as a
sort of magic hocus-pocus, invented by the kindly Fates to amuse
mankind by its oddity, and he frequently made it serve as a plaything
for the whole harem, gathering the odalisks together and compelling
the enchanted pen to answer all sorts of petty questions, as, for
instance, "How old is the old kadun-keit-khuda?" "How many sequins are
in the purse of the Kizlar-Agasi?" "At what o'clock did the Sultan
awake?" "When will the Sultan's tulips arrive?" "How many heads were
thrown to-day into the sea?" "Is Sadi, the poet, still alive?" etc.,
etc. Or they forced the pen to translate the verses of Victor Hugo
into Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. And the pen patiently accomplished
everything. At last it became quite a pet plaything with the odalisks,
and the favorite Sultana altogether forgot the evil prophecy which it
had written down for her.

Now it chanced one day that the famous filibusterer Microconchalys,
who had for a long time disturbed the archipelago with his cruisers,
and defied the whole fleet of the Sultan, encountered in the open sea,
o