his palace he wrote a
letter to the king of the land of the north, begging him, as a favour,
to sell him his slave girl Puruna and her son, and saying that, if he
consented, he would send a messenger to receive them at the river which
divided the kingdoms.

For five days he awaited the reply, and hardly slept or ate, but was as
cross as could be all the time. On the fifth day his messenger returned
with a letter to say that the king of the land of the north would not
sell, but he would give, the king the slave girl and her son. The king
was overjoyed. He sent for his Grand Wazeer and told him that he was
going on one of his lonely expeditions, and that the Wazeer must invent
some excuse to account for his absence. Next he disguised himself as an
ordinary messenger, mounted a swift camel, and sped away to the place
where the slave girl was to be handed over to him. When he got there he
gave the messengers who brought her a letter of thanks and a handsome
present for their master and rewards for themselves; and then without
delay he took the poor woman and her tiny baby-boy up on to his camel
and rode off to a wild desert.

After riding for a day and a night, almost without stopping, he came to
a great cave where he made the woman dismount, and, taking her and the
baby into the cave, he drew his sword and with one blow chopped her
head off. But although his anger made him cruel enough for anything so
dreadful, the king felt that he could not turn his great sword on the
helpless baby, who he was sure must soon die in this solitary place
without its mother; so he left it in the cave where it was, and,
mounting his camel, rode home as fast as he could.

Now, in a small village in his kingdom there lived an old widow who
had no children or relations of any kind. She made her living mostly by
selling the milk of a flock of goats; but she was very, very poor, and
not very strong, and often used to wonder how she would live if she
got too weak or ill to attend to her goats. Every morning she drove the
goats out into the desert to graze on the shrubs and bushes which grew
there, and every evening they came home of themselves to be milked and
to be shut up safely for the night.

One evening the old woman was astonished to find that her very best
nanny-goat returned without a drop of milk. She thought that some
naughty boy or girl was playing a trick upon her and had caught the goat
on its way home and stolen all the milk. But