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 gave him any cause to deserve the least ill treatment from him. You shall judge of it yourself, when you have heard all that passed from the time I left you, till he came to the execution of his wicked plan.'

Then Aladdin began to tell his mother all that had happened to him from the Friday, when the magician took him to see the palaces and gardens about the town, and what happened on the way, till they came to the place between the two mountains, where the strange deeds were performed; how, with incense which the magician threw into the fire, and some magical words which he pronounced, the earth opened, and discovered a cave, which led to an inestimable treasure. He did not forget the blow the magician gave him, and in what manner he softened again, and got him by great promises, putting a ring on his finger, to go down into the cave. He did not omit the least item of what he saw in crossing the three halls and the garden, and in taking the wonderful lamp, which he showed to his mother, as well as the transparent fruit of different colours, which he had gathered in the garden as he returned. But, though these fruits were precious stones, brilliant as the sun, she was as ignorant of their worth as her son, and cared nothing for them. She had been brought up in a middling rank of life, and her husband's poverty prevented his being possessed of such things, nor had she, or her relations or neighbours, ever seen them; so that we must not wonder that she looked on them as things of no value, and only pleasing to the eye by the variety of their colours.

Aladdin put them behind one of the cushions of the sofa he sat upon, and continued his story. When he came to the end, he said to his mother, 'I need say no more; you know the rest. This is my adventure, and the danger I have been exposed to since you saw me.'

Aladdin's mother heard, with patience, this surprising and wonderful story, though it caused no small affliction to a mother who loved her son tenderly; but yet in the part which disclosed the perfidy of the African magician, she could not help showing, by the greatest indignation, how much she detested him; and when Aladdin had finished his story, she broke out into a thousand