sore weeping that there was scarce room to hold them all in the big basket. Now a mud-carrier happened to be passing by who was carting mud away, and hearing the weeping of the damsel was terribly afraid, and cried: "Who art thou?—A Jinn or a Peri?"—"I am neither a Jinn nor yet a Peri," replied the damsel, "but the remains of a living child of man." Whereupon the mud-raker took courage, opened the basket, and there a poor sightless damsel was sobbing, and her tears fell from her in showers of pearls. So he took the damsel by the hand and led her to his hut, and as the old man had nobody about him he adopted the damsel as if she were his own child and took care of her. But the poor girl did nothing but weep for her two eyes, and the old man had all he could do to pick up the pearls, and whenever they were in want of money he would take a pearl and sell it, and they lived on whatever he got for it.
Thus time passed, and there was mirth in the palace, and misery in the hut of the mud-raker. Now it chanced one day as fair Rosa was sitting in the hut, that something made her smile, and immediately a rose bloomed. Then the damsel said to her foster-father, the mud-raker: "Take this rose, papa, and go with it in front of the palace of the King's son, and cry aloud that thou hast roses for sale that are not to be matched in the wide world. But if the dame of the
