THE STORY OF
THE SPEAKING BIRD
HERE WERE ONCE two brothers named Bahman and Perviz, who lived in Persia in the closest and most pleasant friendship with their only sister Parizade. They had never known their father, the Sultan Khosroo Shah, nor he them, for they had been stolen away from the palace one after the other when they were but a day old. Now the Sultan had always been away from home at the time of his children's birth, and on each occasion, when he returned and asked to see the babes, two wicked aunts, who lived in the palace, and had a spite against their sister the Sultaness, told him that they were not children at all, only a dead dog, a cat, and a piece of wood. But the aunts had stolen the real babes, wrapped them in flannel, placed them each in a basket, and sent them, one after the other, adrift down the canal.
It so happened that, just after the first babe was sent adrift, the keeper of the Sultan's gardens, a powerful but kind-hearted officer, who lived on the canal bank some way below the palace, was walking along the path and saw something floating in the water. He called to the gardener, who came with his spade, reached out towards the floating object, and drew it to land. To their great surprise they found it to be a basket containing a beautiful little boy. The keeper, to his great grief, had no children of his own, so he immediately determined to adopt this foundling, and picking up the basket, carried the babe to his wife,
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