(*24) Another had
      the faculty of converting the common metals into gold, without
      even looking at them during the process. (*25) Another had such a
      delicacy of touch that he made a wire so fine as to be invisible. (*26) Another had such quickness of perception that he counted
      all the separate motions of an elastic body, while it was
      springing backward and forward at the rate of nine hundred
      millions of times in a second.’” (*27)

      “Absurd!” said the king. “‘Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody
      ever yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish
      their arms, kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance
      at his will. (*28) Another had cultivated his voice to so great
      an extent that he could have made himself heard from one end of
      the world to the other. (*29) Another had so long an arm that he
      could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad—or
      indeed at any distance whatsoever. (*30) Another commanded the
      lightning to come down to him out of the heavens, and it came at
      his call; and served him for a plaything when it came. Another
      took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence. Another
      constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights. (*31)
      Another made ice in a red-hot furnace. (*32) Another directed the
      sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did. (*33) Another took
      this luminary with the moon and the planets, and having first
      weighed them with scrupulous accuracy, probed into their depths
      and found out the solidity of the substance of which they were
      made. But the whole nation is, indeed, of so surprising a
      necromantic ability, that not even their infants, nor their
      commonest cats and dogs have any difficulty in seeing objects
      that do not exist at all, or that for twenty millions of years
      before the birth of the nation itself had been blotted out from
      the face of creation.’” (*34)

      “Preposterous!” said the king. “‘The wives and daughters of these incomparably great and wise
      magi,’” continued Scheherazade, without being in any manner
      disturbed by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions
      on the part of her husband—“‘the wives and daughters of these
      eminent conjurers are every thing that is accomplished and
      refined; and would be every thing that is interesting and
      beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality that besets them, and from
      which not even the miraculous powers of their husbands and
      fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save. Some fatalities
      come in certain shapes, and some in others—but this of which I
      speak has come in the shape of a crotchet.’”

      “A what?” said the king. “‘A crotchet’” said Scheherazade. “‘One of the evil genii, who
      are perpetually upon the watch to inflict ill, has put it into
      the heads of these accomplished ladies that the thing which we
      describe as personal beauty consists altogether in the
      protuberance of the region which lies not very far below the
      small of the back. Perfection of loveliness, they say, is in the
      direct ratio of the extent of this lump. Having been long
      possessed of this idea, and bolsters being cheap in that country,
      the days have long gone by since it was possible to distinguish a
      woman from a dromedary—’”

      “Stop!” said the king—“I can’t stand that, and I won’t. You have
      already given me a dreadful headache with your lies. The day,
      too, I perceive, is beginning to break. How long have we been
      married?—my conscience is getting to be troublesome again. And
      then that dromedary touch—do you take me for a fool? Upon the
      whole, you might as well get up and be throttled.”

      These words, as I learn from the “Isitsöornot,” both grieved and
      astonished Scheherazade; but, as she knew the king to be a man of
      scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she
      submitted to her fate with a good grace. She derived, however,
      great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from
      the reflection that much of the history remained still untold,
      and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for
      him a most righteous reward, in depriving him of many
      inconceivable adventures. A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM. The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; 
  nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the
  vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, _which have
  a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus_. —_Joseph Glanville_. We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some
      minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak. “Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you
      on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about
      three years past, there happened to me an event such as never
      happened to mortal man—or at least such as no man ever survived
      to tell of—and the six hours of deadly terror which I then
      endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a _very_
      old man—but I am not. It took less than a single day to change
      these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and
      to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion,
      and am frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look
      over this little cliff without getting giddy?”

      The “little cliff,” upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown
      himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung
      over it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his
      elbow on its extreme and slippery edge—this “little cliff” arose,
      a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some
      fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath
      us. Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of
      its brink. In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous
      position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the
      ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance
      upward at the sky—while I struggled in vain to divest myself of
      the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger
      from the fury of the winds. It was long before I could reason
      myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the
      distance.