owed to mention the names of his sons in his presence. Everything,
absolutely everything, which reminded him of them was removed from the
fortress. If any one was weary of life, he had only to mention the
name of Mukhtar before Ali, and death was a certainty.

Meanwhile the two apostate sons were living in great misery at
Adrianople; for the Sultan, though he paid them for their treachery,
would have nothing more to do with them. The first instalment of the
money which they were to receive as the price of their father's blood
melted away very rapidly in merry banquets, pretty female slaves, fine
steeds, and precious gems; and when it was all gone the second
instalment never made its appearance. Far different and far more
important personages had still stronger claims upon the Sultan's
purse. Tepelenti's vigorous resistance, the innumerable losses
suffered by the Sultan's armies, buried in forgetfulness the services
of the good sons whose betrayal of their father had profited the
Sultan nothing. They were already beginning to bitterly repent their
overhasty step when the rumor of Ali's victories reached them; and as
the days of necessity began to weigh heavily upon them, as money and
wine began to fail them, as they found themselves obliged to sell, one
by one, their horses, their jewels, and, at last, even their beautiful
slave-girls, it became quite plain to them that no help could be
looked for from any quarter, unless perhaps it was from wonder-working
fairies, or from the genii of the _Thousand and One Nights_.

But let none say that, in the regions of the merry Orient, fairies and
wonders do not still make their home among men.

Just when the beys had consumed the price of the last slave they had
to sell, such wealth poured in upon them, in heaps, in floods, as we
only hear of in old fairy tales; and fairy tales, as we all know very
well, have no truth in them at all.

* * * * *

One day, as Ali Pasha was walking to and fro on the bastions of
Janina, he perceived among the garden-beds in the court-yard below a
gardener engaged in planting tulips.

Tepelenti knew all the servants in the fortress thoroughly, down to
the very lowest. He not only knew them by name, but he knew what they
had to do and how they did it.

The name of this gardening slave was Dirham, and he was so named
because, many years before Mukhtar had purchased him when a child from
a slave-dealer for a dirham,