Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/484

468 length, he acquired a sagacity which enabled him to perceive endless minute differences among objects which, to the untutored eye, appeared absolutely alike.

It might have been expected that this enlargement of the powers of the mind and of its store of natural knowledge could tend to nothing but the increase of a man's own welfare and the good of his fellow men. But Zadig was fated to experience the vanity of such expectations.

One day, walking near a little wood, he saw, hastening that way, one of the queen's chief eunuchs, followed by a troop of officials, who appeared to he in the greatest anxiety, running hither and thither like men distraught, in search of some lost treasure.

"Young man," cried the eunuch, "have you seen the queen's dog?" Zadig answered modestly, "A bitch, I think, not a dog." "Quite right," replied the eunuch; and Zadig continued: "A very small spaniel who has lately had puppies; she limps with the left foreleg, and has very long ears." "Ah! you have seen her, then?" said the breathless eunuch. "No," answered Zadig, "I have not seen her; and I really was not aware that the queen possessed a spaniel."

By an odd coincidence, at the very same time, the handsomest horse in the king's stables broke away from his groom in the Babylonian plains. The grand huntsman and all his staff were seeking the horse with as much anxiety as the eunuch and his people the spaniel; and the grand huntsman asked Zadig if he had not seen the king's horse go that way.

"A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high; tail three feet and a half long; cheek-pieces of the bit of twenty-three carat gold; shoes silver?" said Zadig.

"Which way did he go? Where is he?" cried the grand huntsman.

"I have not seen anything of the horse, and I never heard of him before," replied Zadig.

The grand huntsman and the chief eunuch made sure that Zadig had stolen both the king's horse and the queen's spaniel, so they haled him before the high court of Desterham, which at once condemned him to the knout and transportation for life to Siberia. But the sentence was hardly pronounced when the lost horse and spaniel were found. So the judges were under the painful necessity of reconsidering their decision; but they fined Zadig four hundred ounces of gold for saying that he had seen that which he had not seen.

The first thing was to pay the fine; afterward Zadig was permitted to open his defense to the court, which he did in the following terms:

"Stars of justice, abysses of knowledge, mirrors of truth, whose gravity is as that of lead, whose inflexibility is as that of iron, who rival the diamond in clearness, and possess no little affinity with gold; since I am permitted to address your august assembly, I swear by Ormuzd that I have never seen the respectable lady dog of the queen, nor beheld the sacrosanct horse of the King of kings.

"This is what happened: I was taking a walk toward the little wood near which I subsequently had the honor to meet the venerable chief eunuch and the most illustrious grand huntsman. I noticed the track of an animal in the sand, and it was easy to see that it was that of a small dog. Long faint streaks upon the little elevations of sand between the foot-marks convinced me that it was a she-dog, with pendent dugs—showing that she must have had