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The sultan could not conceal his impatience when the coming of day brought Scheherazade to a conclusion. He told her that he would wait as usual until a like hour on the night to come for what remained of her story, and took an affectionate leave of her.

The next night she began in these words:

Morgiana went out early the next morning to a druggist, and asked for a sort of lozenge which was considered efficacious in the most dangerous disorders. The apothecary inquired who was ill. She replied, with a sigh, her good master Cassim himself: and that he could neither eat nor speak. In the evening Morgiana went to the same druggist’s again, and with tears in her eyes, asked for an essence which they used to give to sick people only when at the last extremity. “Alas!” said she, taking it from the apothecary, “I am afraid that this remedy will have no better effect than the lozenges; and that I shall lose my good master.”

As Ali Baba and his wife were often seen to go between Cassim’s and their own house all that day, and to seem melancholy, nobody was surprised in the evening to hear the lamentable shrieks and cries of Cassim’s wife and Morgiana, who gave out everywhere that her master was dead. The next morning at daybreak, Morgiana went to an old cobbler whom she knew to be always early at his stall, and bid-

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