ell the truth, his eyes are not open at all! He has them fast
closed; for so, he knows, he can see his mother.

"Ladies! Unveil!" comes the king's voice. It sounds a little anxious.

[Illustration: "_Ladies! unveil!_"]

There is a rustling of silks and satins, a faint swishing of gauze and
muslins, and three hundred faces flash out, like flowers against leaves,
from their green draperies.

Which is Queen Humeeda's?

For an instant the child stands silent, his lips trembling, his face
flushing. Then his eyes open and he sees something.

What is it?

Is one face less smiling than another?

Where is it? In the first row, or the second row, or the third row?

What matter? There is a glad cry of----

"Amma-_jan_! My Amma-_jan_. There you are!" And a little flying figure
in rose-coloured satin has dashed across the floor to fling itself into
the arms of--Queen Humeeda.

Little Akbar has found his own darlingest mother, and there is not a dry
eye in the whole assemblage.

CHAPTER XIX

BETWIXT CUP AND LIP

Now it may indeed seem that all our little Heir-to-Empire's troubles
were over; but there is still somewhat to tell of our young hero. To
begin with, Queen Humeeda was a wise woman, and she saw that it was not
good for the little lad to be always at play. She knew that as a King's
son in the East, he would have small time after he was ten for
schooling, and as he was now close on four that did not leave many years
for teaching.

So a tutor was found for him; but it is to be feared that he was by no
means an industrious scholar. Indeed, we hear of such dreadful things as
playing truant, so that when a day was fixed for an examination by
learned men as to how the Heir-to-Empire was getting on with his
studies, "at the master moment it was found that the scholar, having
attired himself for sport, had disappeared!" Then his first tutor was
dismissed because he encouraged his pupil in pigeon flying, and we read
of his applying his thoughts more to dog-fancying and Arab horses than
to his books. Still he did learn one thing, and a good thing, too.

The day he was four years and four days old he was taught, as all little
Mohammedans are taught, to understand _what_ he was, _what_ the world
about him was, and to recognise that neither he himself, nor the world
he lived in were the Beginning and the End of all things. It was a
stately ceremonial, not beautiful, and lavish, and expensive like the
Festival o