isdiction of his government, he ordered these troublesome children
to be taken into custody. He came down himself to search for his
diamonds; but, amidst such confusion, this search was fruitless.
Driven by degrees to indignation and fury, he accused the children,
not only of being the cause of the loss of his diamonds, but even of
having stolen them. Their innocence could not defend them against
prejudice. He punished them with the bastinado, and then caused each
of them to be tied to a board and cast into the sea. The innocent
victims, expecting a cruel death, became the sport of the waves and
billows.

Meanwhile night approached, and the spouse of Illage, not seeing her
children return, uneasy, and bathed in tears, went out to seek them.
The neighbours could tell her nothing of them. She ran from street to
street, without meeting any person who could satisfy her well-founded
impatience. This tender mother came at last to the harbour. There,
from the description she gave of the three persons who were the object
of her search and the cause of her uneasiness, a sailor replied to
her,

"Madam, the young people whom you inquire after are the same whom a
powerful man, lately arrived from India, hath punished by his slaves
for a theft which he imputed to them. They gave them the bastinado,
tied them to a plank, and, by his order, threw them into the sea."

At these words, the unhappy mother filled the air with her shrieks and
groans: she rent her clothes and tore her hair. "O my children," said
she, "where is the Vizier your father, to revenge me on the man who
hath murdered my children?"

Her despair struck the ear of her husband, who was not far distant. He
seemed to know the voice, and learned that it was that of the
inconsolable mother whose children he had condemned to death. The cry
of nature resounded in his heart, and he no longer doubted that the
children he had punished were his own. He hastened to the unfortunate
woman whose misery he had occasioned, and immediately knew her.

"Ah, barbarian that I am, I have been the murderer of our children!
Fatal power with which I am invested! blinded by thee, I had not time
allowed me to be just! I am the executioner of my own children!"

As he spoke these words, all the signs of the most violent despair
were painted in his countenance, and manifested themselves by every
sort of extravagance. His wife sank at his feet under the weight of
her grief.

"Do not pardon m