me. 'Twere better, methinks, if I had remained on my shoemaker's bench."
"'Twere indeed better for thee to have done so, good fellow, if thou canst say nothing better than that," replied Hamet angrily, for he was a stupid as well as an ambitious man. "Let's have something better from thee, else the bastinado shall drive sense from thy heels into thy head."
"Nay, then, it is hard," returned Baba, with a smile, "to be asked to talk sense when I was hired by thy late master—"
"My late master!" roared the Dey.
"Surely I said 'my late master,' did I not?" returned Hadji Baba, rubbing his forehead as if he were confused—as, in truth, the poor fellow was, by the terrible scenes that had lately been enacted in the palace. "As I meant to say, then,—it is hard for me to talk sense when my late master hired me expressly to talk nonsense!"
"H'm, yes, very true," replied the Dey, looking wise. "Let me, then, hear some of thy nonsense."
"Ah, your highness, that is easily done," said Baba, with sudden animation. "What shall be the subject of my discourse?—the affairs of state?"
The Dey nodded.
"Let me, then, make a broad statement of a nonsensical kind, which, in its particular applications may be said to be endless. A throne won by
