Page:Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp.djvu/50

8 queen his mother proceeded to admonish him and to forbid him from his ill fashions, bidding him leave that manner of life and apply himself to governance and administration and the ordinance of the realm, lest the folk reject him and rise up against him and expel hira;him; [sic] but he would hear not a word from her and abode in his ignorance and folly. At this the people murmured, for that the grandees of the realm put out their hands unto oppression, whenas they saw the king’s lack of concern for his subjects; so they rose up in rebellion against Zein ul Asnam and would have laid violent hands upon him, had not the queen his mother been a woman of wit and judgment and address, and the people loved her; so she appeased the folk and promised them good. Then she called her son Zein ul Asnam to her and said to him, “See, O my son; said I not to thee that thou wouldest lose thy kingship and eke thy life, an thou persistedst in this thine ignorance and folly, in that thou givest the ordinance of the sultanate into the hands of raw youths and eschewest the old and wastest thy substance and that of the realm, squandering it all upon lewdness and the lust of thy soul?”