“I am excessively mortified, to be obliged to disobey your highness,” added Ziguezague; “but⁠—”

“But you are a scoundrel,” interrupted Mangogul, incensed at a refusal so much out of place; “quit my palace, and never appear there more.”

Poor Ziguezague disappear’d, having learn’d by experience, that a man of spirit ought not to enter the palaces of most part of the great, without leaving his sentiments at the gate. His deputy was called. He was a Provençal, frank, honest, and thoroughly disinterested. He flew whither he thought his duty and fortune called him, made a low bow to the Sultan, a lower still to his mare, and wrote everything that the beast vouchsafed to dictate.