ft to live!"

"Come, come!" said I, "surely it is not so bad as all that. I trust that
you may be spared to me for many years."

"I hope," answered he, "that your life may be long, but as for me, all
is finished. I have set my house in order, and to-day I shall be buried
with my wife. This has been the law upon our island from the earliest
ages--the living husband goes to the grave with his dead wife, the
living wife with her dead husband. So did our fathers, and so must we
do. The law changes not, and all must submit to it!"

As he spoke the friends and relations of the unhappy pair began to
assemble. The body, decked in rich robes and sparkling with jewels, was
laid upon an open bier, and the procession started, taking its way to a
high mountain at some distance from the city, the wretched husband,
clothed from head to foot in a black mantle, following mournfully.

When the place of interment was reached the corpse was lowered, just as
it was, into a deep pit. Then the husband, bidding farewell to all his
friends, stretched himself upon another bier, upon which were laid seven
little loaves of bread and a pitcher of water, and he also was let
down-down-down to the depths of the horrible cavern, and then a stone
was laid over the opening, and the melancholy company wended its way
back to the city.

You may imagine that I was no unmoved spectator of these proceedings; to
all the others it was a thing to which they had been accustomed from
their youth up; but I was so horrified that I could not help telling the
King how it struck me.

"Sire," I said, "I am more astonished than I can express to you at the
strange custom which exists in your dominions of burying the living with
the dead. In all my travels I have never before met with so cruel and
horrible a law."

"What would you have, Sindbad?" he replied. "It is the law for
everybody. I myself should be buried with the Queen if she were the
first to die."

"But, your Majesty," said I, "dare I ask if this law applies to
foreigners also?"

"Why, yes," replied the king smiling, in what I could but consider a
very heartless manner: "they are no exception to the rule if they have
married in the country."

When I heard this I went home much cast down, and from that time forward
my mind was never easy. If only my wife's little finger ached I fancied
she was going to die, and sure enough before very long she fell really
ill and in a few days breathed her last. My di