their own. All of them were so quick and clever and good that the keeper had them taught by the very best masters he could procure, and although the sister was the youngest, she was soon as proficient in all learning, and in riding, running, and shooting the arrow or javelin as her brothers.
The keeper was so overjoyed to find his adopted children so accomplished in body and mind, and so well justifying the care and expense he had bestowed upon their education, that he determined, before he died, to build them a country house at some distance from the city, surrounded by woods, meadows, and corn-land, and to furnish it most magnificently. He then asked permission of the Sultan to retire from his service, saying that he was growing old, and wished to end his days in peace and tranquillity. The Sultan granted his request, but only six months later the keeper died so suddenly that he was unable to give the princes and princess any account of the mystery which hung over their birth, as he had resolved to do.
The Princes Bahman and Perviz, and the Princess Parizade, who knew no other father, regretted and bewailed him as such, and paid him all the honours at his funeral which their love and filial gratitude required of them. Content with the plentiful fortune he left them, they lived together in the same perfect union, free from any ambition for places of honour and dignity at Court, which they might easily have obtained.
One day when the two princes were hunting, and the Princess Parizade stayed at home, a religious old woman came to the gate, and desired leave to come in and say her prayers, it being then the hour. The servants went and asked the princess, who ordered them to show her into the chapel, which the keeper of the Sultan's gardens had taken care to fit up in his house, for want of a mosque in the neighbourhood. She bade them also, after the good woman had finished her prayers, show her the house and gardens, and then bring her to her.
The religious old woman went into the chapel and said her prayers, and when she came out again, two of the princess's women invited her to see the house and gardens; she accepted, and followed from one apartment to another, and observed, as a person
