him long and steadily and she saw through his
rags that he was indeed a noble youth with a body made strong and
beautiful through exercise and toil and she thought to herself:

"It were not a hard fate to marry this youth!"

Then she questioned him:

"Are you the Sultan's Third Son?"

"I am."

"Then why are you dressed as a beggar?"

"Because I was set upon at the crossroads and beaten insensible and my
clothes torn to rags. I was coming home with the Nightingale Gisar in my
hands and I lay down at the roadside to rest while I awaited the coming
of my brothers. When I awoke to consciousness the Nightingale and its
golden cage were gone. I came home to my father's city as a beggar and
there they told me that my brothers had come just before me bringing
with them the Nightingale and boasting of the perils they had been
through and the dangers they had faced. But the Nightingale, they told
me, hanging in its golden cage beside the fountain, was silent. Yet when
I went to the mosque it always sang."

The Warrior Princess looked deep into his eyes and knew that he was
speaking truth. Her heart was touched with compassion at the wrong he
had suffered from his brothers, but she hid her feelings and questioned
him further.

"Then it was you," she said, "who really took from me my glorious
Nightingale Gisar?"

"Yes, Princess, it was. I crept past the lion and the wolf and the tiger
just after midnight while they slept. I blew out the four candles at the
head of your bed and lighted those at the foot. The golden cage of the
Nightingale was hanging from a golden chain. Before I unfastened it I
looked at you once, as you lay sleeping, and dared not look a second
time."

"Why not?" the Princess asked.

"Because, O Flower o' the World, you were so beautiful that I feared,
were I to look again, I should forget the Nightingale Gisar and cry out
in ecstacy."

Then the compassion in the Princess's heart changed to love and she knew
for a certainty that this was the man she was fated to wed.

She clapped her hands and when the guards came in she said to them:

"Call my warriors together that I may show them the Sultan's Youngest
Son and the man who stole from me my glorious Nightingale Gisar and whom
I am fated to wed."

So the warriors came in until they crowded the tent to its utmost. Then
the Princess stood up and took the Sultan's Youngest Son by the hand and
presented him to the warriors and told them of his great