a good deal older than when I had been living in her domains.  This delighted me, for before coming to Jerusalem I had allowed my hair and beard to grow, and had dispensed with as much as possible of my ordinary erect mien and lightness of step; for I was very much afraid, if I were not careful, that the wise king would find out that there was something irregular in my longevity, and an old man may continue to look old much longer than a middle-aged man can continue to appear middle-aged.

“It was a great advantage to me to find myself admitted to a certain intimacy with both the king and his visitor the queen.  As I was a subject of neither of them, they seemed to think this circumstance allowed a little more familiarity than otherwise they would have shown.  Besides, my age had a great deal to do with the freedom with which they spoke to me.  Each of them seemed anxious to know everything I could tell about the other, and I would sometimes be subjected to embarrassing questions.

“There is a great deal of extravagance and perversion in the historical and traditional accounts of the tricks which these two royal personages played upon each other.  Most of these old stories are too silly to repeat, but some of them had foundation in fact.  They tell a tale of how the queen set five hundred boys and five hundred girls before the king, all the girls dressed as boys and all the boys dressed as girls, and then she asked him, as he was such a wise man, immediately to distinguish those of one sex from those of the other.  Solomon did not hesitate a moment, but ordering basins of water to be brought, he commanded the young people to wash their hands.  Thereupon he watched them closely, and as the boys washed only their hands, while the girls rolled up their sleeves and washed their arms as well as their hands, Solomon was able, without any trouble, to pick out the one from the other.  Now, something of this kind really happened, but there were only ten boys and ten girls.  But in the course of ages the story grew, and the whole thing was made absurd; for there never was a king in the world, nor would there be likely to be one, who could have a thousand basins ready immediately to put before a company who wished to wash their hands.  But the result of this scheme convinced the queen that Solomon was a man of the deepest insight into the manners and customs of human beings, as well as those of animals, birds, and fishes.

“But there is an incident with which I was personally connected which was known at the time to very few people, and was never publicly related.  The beautiful queen desired, above all other things, to know whether Solomon held her in such high esteem because she was a mighty queen, or on account of her personal attractions; and in order to discover the truth in regard to this question, she devised a little scheme to which she made me a party.  There was a young woman in her train, of surpassing beauty, whose name was Liridi,