scrupulous accuracy, probed into their depths and found out the solidity of the substance of which they were made.  But the whole nation is, indeed, of so surprising a necromantic ability, that not even their infants, nor their commonest cats and dogs have any difficulty in seeing objects that do not exist at all, or that for twenty millions of years before the birth of the nation itself had been blotted out from the face of creation."’ {*34}

Analogous experiments in respect to sound produce analogous results.

“Preposterous!” said the king.

“’The wives and daughters of these incomparably great and wise magi,’” continued Scheherazade, without being in any manner disturbed by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions on the part of her husband —­ “’the wives and daughters of these eminent conjurers are every thing that is accomplished and refined; and would be every thing that is interesting and beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality that besets them, and from which not even the miraculous powers of their husbands and fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save.  Some fatalities come in certain shapes, and some in others —­ but this of which I speak has come in the shape of a crotchet.’”

“A what?” said the king.

“‘A crotchet’” said Scheherazade. “’One of the evil genii, who are perpetually upon the watch to inflict ill, has put it into the heads of these accomplished ladies that the thing which we describe as personal beauty consists altogether in the protuberance of the region which lies not very far below the small of the back.  Perfection of loveliness, they say, is in the direct ratio of the extent of this lump.  Having been long possessed of this idea, and bolsters being cheap in that country, the days have long gone by since it was possible to distinguish a woman from a dromedary-’”

“Stop!” said the king —­ “I can’t stand that, and I won’t.  You have already given me a dreadful headache with your lies.  The day, too, I perceive, is beginning to break.  How long have we been married? —­ my conscience is getting to be troublesome again.  And then that dromedary touch —­ do you take me for a fool?  Upon the whole, you might as well get up and be throttled.”

These words, as I learn from the “Isitsoornot,” both grieved and astonished Scheherazade; but, as she knew the king to be a man of scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she submitted to her fate with a good grace.  She derived, however, great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from the reflection that much of the history remained still untold, and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for him a most righteous reward, in depriving him of many inconceivable adventures.

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A descent into the Maelström.

    The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our
ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. Joseph Glanville. . 
   We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag.  For some
minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.