with an order to throw them by handfuls among the people as they went to the sultan's palace. The six slaves who carried the purses, he ordered likewise to march before him, three on the right hand and three on the left. Afterwards he presented the six women-slaves to his mother, telling her they were her slaves, and that the dresses they had brought were for her use.
When Aladdin had thus settled matters, he told the genie he would call for him when he wanted him, and thereupon the genie disappeared. Aladdin's thoughts now were only of answering, as soon as possible, the desire the sultan had shown to see him. He despatched one of the forty slaves to the palace, with an order to address himself to the chief of the officers, to know when he might have the honour to come and throw himself at the sultan's feet. The slave soon acquitted himself of his message, and brought for answer that the sultan waited for him with impatience.
Aladdin immediately mounted his horse, and began his march in the order we have already described; and though he never was on a horse's back before, he rode with such extraordinary grace that the most experienced horseman would not have taken him for a novice. The streets through which he was to pass were almost instantly filled with an enormous crowd of people, who made the air echo with their shouts, especially every time the six slaves who carried the purses threw handfuls of gold into the air on both sides. Those who knew him once when he played in the streets like a vagabond, did not know him again; those who had seen him but a little while before hardly knew him, so greatly were his features altered: such were the effects of the lamp.
Much more attention was paid to Aladdin than to the pomp and magnificence of his attendants, which had been taken notice of the day before, when the slaves walked in procession with the present to the sultan. Nevertheless the horse was very much admired by good judges, who knew how to discern his beauties without being dazzled with the jewels and richness of the harness: and when the report was everywhere spread about that the sultan was going to give the Princess Badroulboudour in marriage to him, nobody thought of his birth, nor envied his good fortune, so worthy he seemed of it.
