About noon the lady came in, with six shop clerks after her, bearing packages, tossed off her head-dress, and flung herself inanimately on the sofa.

‘Ahem,’ grunted Sid Norman, who was concealed in the shadow of an alcove.

Amina looked up.  Furies! what an appalling rencontre!  She looked as pale as the corpses which she adored; she would have shrieked, but had no more voice than a ghost; she would have fled, but was riveted as with the gaze of a basilisk.

‘Dear,’ said Sid Norman, with an uxorious smile, ’what ails you?  Has the fast of Kamazan begun?  Hardly yet, for this looks more like the carnival.  How much gave you for this Cashmere, my love?’

A great sculptor was Sid Norman, for, without lifting a hand, or using any other tool than a keen eye and a sharp tongue, he had wrought out before him, carved as in cold marble, the statue of a beautiful, bad woman.  Such is genius.  Such is conscience!

‘Mrs. Amina Sidi Ghoul Norman,’ proceeded the husband, giving his wife time to relax a little from her rigor, ’is dinner ready?  We want nothing but a little rice.  Set on only two plates, a knife and fork for me, and a bodkin for you, if you please, madam.’

(A symptom of hysterics, checked by a nightmare inability of action.)

’Have you nothing to say?  Is thy servant a dog?  Why have you wrought this deviltry?  Take that.’

Therewith he flung some liquid in her face, and the late fashionable lady of Bagdad became a mare.  Sid seized a cow-skin, and laid on with a will.

‘You may now cut up as many capers as you please,’ said he, reining her in with a bit and bridle, and cutting her with the whip until the blood rolled.  ‘To-morrow you may go to grass in the graveyard.’

Every day he made a practice of lashing her around the square, if possible, to get the devil out of her.  When the Caliph Haroun Alraschid learned the true cause of such conduct, he remarked that it was punishment enough to be transformed into a beast; and, while the stripes should be remitted, still he would not have the woman to assume her own shape again, as she would be a dangerous person in his good city of Bagdad.

* * * * *

The moral of this tale of sorcery, which is equal to any in AEsop’s Fables, may be drawn from a posthumous letter which was found among the papers of Sidi Norman, and is as follows:—­

  ’TO BEN HADAD, SON OF BEN HADAD.

’You, who stand upon the verge of youth,—­for that is the age, and there is the realm, of genii, fairies, and wild ’enchantments,—­learn wisdom from the said story of Sidi Norman.