Beder el Bedour then called the King back, as he was going, and said to him, `O our master! you have not granted me any favour yet. `How,' said he, `I have sent for a beautiful mule for you; you will mount her and come with us. As for these women, they must all of them die.'

She then said, `O our master! I ask you and conjure you to authorise me to make a stipulation which you will accept.' The King made oath that he would fulfil it. Then she said, `I ask as a gift the pardon of all these women and of all these maidens. Their deaths would moreover throw the most terrible consternation over the whole town.'

The King said, `There is no might nor power but in God, the merciful!' He then ordered the negroes to be taken out and beheaded. The only exception he made was with the negro Dorérame, who was enormously stout and had a neck like a bull. They cut off his ears, nose, and lips; likewise his virile member, which they put into his mouth, and then hung him on a gallows.

Then the King ordered the seven doors of the house to be closed, and returned to his palace.

At sunrise he sent a mule to Beder el Bedour, in order to let her be brought to him. He made her dwell with him, and found her to be excelling all those who excel.

`Then the King caused the wife of Omar ben Isad to be restored to him, and he made him his private secretary. After which he ordered the Vizir to repudiate his wife. He did not forget the Chaouch and the Commander of the Guards, to whom he made large presents, as he had promised, using for that purpose the negro's hoards. He sent the son of his father's Vizir to prison. He also caused the old go- between to be brought before him, and asked her, `Give me all the particulars about the conduct of the negro, and tell me whether it was well done to bring in that way women to men.' She answered, `This is the trade of nearly all old women.' He then had her executed, as well as all old women who followed that trade, and thus cut off in his State the tree of panderism at the root, and burnt the trunk.

He besides sent back to their families all the women and girls, and bade them repent in the name of God.

This story presents but a small part of the tricks and stratagems used by women against their husbands.

The moral of the tale is, that a man who falls in love with a woman imperils himself, and exposes himself to the greatest troubles.