In the morning they presented them at the royal tribunal, and the king gave an order to put the whole to death.  There happened to be among them a stripling, the fruit of whose early spring was ripening in its bloom, and the flower-garden of his cheek shooting into blossom.  One of the vizirs kissed the foot of the imperial throne, and laid the face of intercession on the ground, and said, “This boy has not yet tasted the fruit of the garden of life, nor enjoyed the fragrance of the flowers of youth:  such is my confidence in the generous disposition of his Majesty that it will favor a devoted servant by sparing his blood.”  The king turned his face away from this speech; as it did not accord with his lofty way of thinking, he replied:—­“The rays of the virtuous cannot illuminate such as are radically vicious; to give education to the worthless is like throwing walnuts upon a dome:—­it were wiser to eradicate the tree of their wickedness, and annihilate their tribe; for to put out a fire and leave the embers, and to kill a viper and foster its young, would not be the acts of rational beings.  Though the clouds pour down the water of vegetation, thou canst never gather fruit from a willow twig.  Exalt not the fortune of the abject, for thou canst never extract sugar from a mat or common cane.”

The vizir listened to this speech; willingly or not he approved of it, and applauded the good sense of the king, and said:—­“What his majesty, whose dominion is eternal, is pleased to remark is the mirror of probity and essence of good policy, for had he been brought up in the society of those vagabonds, and confined to their service, he would have followed their vicious courses.  Your servant, however, trusts that he may be instructed to associate with the virtuous, and take to the habits of the prudent; for he is still a child, and the lawless and refractory principles of that gang cannot have yet tainted his mind; and it is in tradition that—­Whatever child is born, and he is verily born after the right way of orthodoxy, namely Islamism, afterwards his father and his mother bring him up as a Jew, Christian, or Guebre.—­The wife of Lot associated with the wicked, and her posterity failed in the gift of prophecy; the dog of the seven sleepers (at Ephesus) for some time took the path of the righteous, and became a rational being.”

He said this, and a body of the courtiers joined him in intercession, till the king acceded to the youth’s pardon, and answered:  “I gave him up, though I saw not the good of it.—­Knowest thou what Zal said to the heroic Rustem:  ’Thou must not consider thy foe as abject and helpless.  I have often found a small stream at the fountain-head, which, when followed up, carried away the camel and its load.’”