The friends laughed, and Darius, joining in their merriment, said:  “Now you shall hear a piece of very good news.  I have kept it to the last, because it is the best I have.  Now, Bartja, prick up your ears.  Your mother, the noble Kassandane, has been cured of her blindness!  Yes, yes, it is quite true.—­Who cured her?  Why who should it be, but that crabbed old Nebenchari, who has become, if possible, moodier than ever.  Come, now, calm yourselves, and let me go on with my story; or it will be morning before Bartja gets to sleep.  Indeed.  I think we had better separate now:  you’ve heard the best, and have something to dream about What, you will not?  Then, in the name of Mithras, I must go on, though it should make my heart bleed.

“I’ll begin with the king.  As long as Phanes was in Babylon, he seemed to forget his grief for Nitetis.

“The Athenian was never allowed to leave him.  They were as inseparable as Reksch and Rustem.  Cambyses had no time to think of his sorrow, for Phanes had always some new idea or other, and entertained us all, as well as the king, marvellously.  And we all liked him too; perhaps, because no one could really envy him.  Whenever he was alone, the tears came into his eyes at the thought of his boy, and this made his great cheerfulness—­a cheerfulness which he always managed to impart to the king, Bartja,—­the more admirable.  Every morning he went down to the Euphrates with Cambyses and the rest of us, and enjoyed watching the sons of the Achaemenidae at their exercises.  When he saw them riding at full speed past the sand-hills and shooting the pots placed on them into fragments with their arrows, or throwing blocks of wood at one another and cleverly evading the blows, he confessed that he could not imitate them in these exercises, but at the same time he offered to accept a challenge from any of us in throwing the spear and in wrestling.  In his quick way he sprang from his horse, stripped off his clothes—­it was really a shame—­and, to the delight of the boys, threw their wrestling-master as if he had been a feather.

[In the East, nudity was, even in those days, held to be disgraceful, while the Greeks thought nothing so beautiful as the naked human body.  The Hetaira Phryne was summoned before the judges for an offence against religion.  Her defender, seeing that sentence was about to be pronounced against his client, suddenly tore away the garment which covered her bosom.  The artifice was successful.  The judges pronounced her not guilty, being convinced that such wondrous grace and beauty could only belong to a favorite of Aphrodite.  Athen.  XIII. p. 590]

“Then he knocked over a number of bragging fellows, and would have thrown me too if he had not been too fatigued.  I assure you, I am really stronger than he is, for I can lift greater weights, but he is as nimble as an eel, and has wonderful tricks by which he gets hold of his adversary.  His being