session of that of the lap dog, in order to please his mother by bringing her favourite back to life.
When the Dervise entered the Queen’s apartment he found her to his infinite astonishment, playing with the pretty little dog, frisking about as usual. In great glee she acquainted him that as she was lamenting over the little fellow just before, and stroking him for the last time, he jumped up, and began to bark, caressing her as if nothing had happened. “Indeed,” she continued, “I think I never should be comforted for the loss either of my pretty lap dog, or of my sweet nightingale, that pours such delightful songs.” Saying this, “she looked up, and what a sight! she beheld her nightingale stretched lifeless at the bottom of his cage.”
The extravagance of her grief was now greater than for the loss of her dog, and she refused to be comforted. The Dervise, irritated at these lamentations, and forgetting for a moment the part he was playing, reproached the Queen sharply for this morbid sensibility; a weakness he said, the less excusable as she must know that all that lives must sometime die; and he added mockery to his reproaches. “Strange,” he continued, “that she, who had been deprived of a consort whom she ought to have loved infinitely more than these senseless animals, could have consoled herself for his loss, and yet waste her foolish lamentations over them.”
