ot forgotten, how many hours have I got to live?"

The pen wrote down the number "7."

Those who stood around now began to tremble. But Mahmoud treated the
whole affair as a joke, and assured them that the pen was only making
them sport. And again they went on diverting themselves.

An hour later the clocks, in the usual sequence, struck the hour of
five. And now the favorite stole aside, and placing the reed on a
table repeated her former question. And the pen wrote down the number
"6."

Thus, with each hour, the number indicated was lesser by one than the
previous number. The Sultan observed the gloom of his favorite, and to
drive away her sad thoughts, compelled her to retire to her
bedchamber, where she enjoyed two hours of sweet repose, leaning on
the Sultan's breast; whereupon the Sultan arose and went into his
dressing-room, for he had to hold a divan, or council.

The first thing the favorite did on awaking was to look at the time,
and she perceived that it was now seven o'clock. She immediately
hastened to interrogate the pen, and asked the question of it with
fear and trembling; and now the pen wrote down the number "4."

* * * * *

The Sultan himself sent for Morrison.

The English sailor was proudly conscious of owning no master but the
sea. During his long roamings in the East and South he had always made
it a point of visiting all the barbarous chiefs and princes who came
in his way. He regarded them simply as freaks of nature, whose absurd
rites and customs he meant to thoroughly investigate in order that he
might make a note of them in his diary, and he even went the length of
adopting for a time their manners and customs, if he could not get
what he wanted in any other way.

A summons to appear before the divan was scarcely of more importance
in his eyes than an invitation to a wild elephant hunt, or initiation
into the mysteries of Mumbo Jumbo, or an ascent in the perilous aerial
ship of Montgolfier. He donned a dark-blue-colored garment and a
plumed three-cornered hat, and condescended to allow himself to be
conducted by the ichoglanler specially told off to do him honor to the
splendid canopied, six-oared pinnace, which was to take him to the
palace.

They escorted him first to the Gate of Fountains, and left him waiting
for a few moments in the Chamber of Lions, allowing him in the
meanwhile to draw a pocket-book from his breast-pocket and make a
rapid ske