ll started, amidst thunderous salutes from
the ramparts of the city, and much dust, and cheering, and blaring of
trumpets.

Day after day they moved on, and every day the poor merchant felt more
ill and miserable. He wondered what kind of death the king would
invent for him, and went through almost as much torture, as he lay
awake nearly the whole of every night thinking over the situation, as
he would have suffered if the king's executioners were already setting
to work upon his neck.

At last they were only one day's march from Wali Dad's little mud
home. Here a great encampment was made, and the merchant was sent on
to tell Wali Dad that the King and Princess of Khaistan had arrived
and were seeking an interview. When the merchant arrived he found the
poor old man eating his evening meal of onions and dry bread, and when
he told him of all that had happened he had not the heart to proceed
to load him with the reproaches which rose to his tongue. For Wali Dad
was overwhelmed with grief and shame for himself, for his friend, and
for the name and honour of the princess; and he wept and plucked at
his beard, and groaned most piteously. With tears he begged the
merchant to detain them for one day by any kind of excuse he could
think of, and to come in the morning to discuss what they should do.

As soon as the merchant was gone Wali Dad made up his mind that there
was only one honourable way out of the shame and distress that he had
created by his foolishness, and that was--to kill himself. So, without
stopping to ask any one's advice, he went off in the middle of the
night to a place where the river wound along at the base of steep
rocky cliffs of great height, and determined to throw himself down and
put an end to his life. When he got to the place he drew back a few
paces, took a little run, and at the very edge of that dreadful black
gulf he stopped short! He _could_ not do it!

From below, unseen in the blackness of the deep night shadows, the
water roared and boiled round the jagged rocks--he could picture the
place as he knew it, only ten times more pitiless and forbidding in
the visionless darkness; the wind soughed through the gorge with
fearsome sighs, and rustlings and whisperings, and the bushes and
grasses that grew in the ledges of the cliffs seemed to him like
living creatures that danced and beckoned, shadowy and indistinct. An
owl laughed 'Hoo! hoo!' almost in his face, as he peered over the edge
of