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 of your majesty's conduct, since you did nothing but what your duty required of you. This infamous magician, the basest of men, was the sole cause of my misfortune. When your majesty has leisure, I will give you an account of another villainous action he was guilty of to me, which was no less black and base than this, from which I was preserved in a very strange manner.'

'I will take an opportunity, and that very shortly,' replied the sultan, 'to hear it; but in the meantime let us think only of rejoicing, and the removal of this odious object.'

Aladdin ordered the magician's dead carcass to be removed. In the meantime the sultan commanded the drums, trumpets, cymbals, and other instruments of music to sound, and a feast of ten days to be proclaimed for joy at the return of the Princess Badroulboudour, and Aladdin with his palace.

Thus Aladdin escaped a second time the danger of losing his life.

But the African magician had a younger brother, who was as great a necromancer, and even surpassed him in villainy and pernicious designs. As they did not live together, or in the same city, but oftentimes when one was in tho cast the other was in the west, they each failed not every year to discover by their art where the other was, and whether he stood in need of any assistance.

Some time after the African magician had failed in his enterprise against Aladdin's happiness, his younger brother, who had not heard any tidings of him for a year, and was not in Africa, but in a distant country, was anxious to know in what part of the world he was, how he did, and what he was doing; and as he, as well as his brother, always carried a geomantic square instrument about with him, he prepared the sand, cast the points, and drew the figures. On examining the 'houses' he found that his brother was no longer living, that he had been poisoned, and died suddenly; that it had happened in the capital of the kingdom of China, and that the person who had poisoned him was of low birth, and married to a princess, a sultan's daughter.

When the magician had after this manner learned his brother's fate, he lost no time in useless regret, which could not restore