468 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



length, he acquired a sagacity which enabled him to perceive endless 

 minute differences among objects which, to the untutored eye, ap- 

 peared absolutely alike. 



It might have been expected that this enlargement of the powers 

 of the mind and of its store of natural knowledge could tend to nothing 

 but the increase of a man's own welfare and the good of his fellow 

 men. But Zadig was fated to experience the vanity of such expec- 

 tations. 



One day, walking near a little wood, he saw, hastening that way, one of the 

 queen's chief eunuchs, followed by a troop of officials, who appeared to he in 

 the greatest anxiety, running hither and thither like men distraught, in search 

 of some lost treasure. 



" Young man," cried the eunuch, "have you seen the queen's dog? " Zadig 

 answered modestly, "A bitch, I think, not a dog." "Quite right," replied the 

 enuuch ; and Zadig continued : "A very small spaniel who has lately had puppies ; 

 she limps with the left foreleg, and has very long ears." "Ah! you have seen 

 her, then?" said the breathless eunuch. "No," answered Zadig, "I have not 

 seen her ; and I really was not aware that the queen possessed a spaniel." 



By an odd coincidence, at the very same time, the handsomest horse in the 

 king's stables broke away from his groom in the Babylonian plains. The grand 

 huntsman and all his staff were seeking the horse with as much anxiety as the 

 eunuch and his people the spaniel ; and the grand huntsman asked Zadig if he 

 had not seen the king's horse go that way. 



" A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high ; tail three feet and a half 

 long; cheek-pieces of the bit of twenty-three carat gold; shoes silver? " said 

 Zadig. 



" Which way did he go? Where is he? " cried the grand huntsman. 



" I have not seen anything of the horse, and I never heard of him before," 

 replied Zadig. 



The grand huntsman and the chief eunuch made sure that Zadig had stolen 

 both the king's horse and the queen's spaniel, so they haled him before the 

 high court of Desterham, which at once condemned him to the knout and trans- 

 portation for life to Siberia. But the sentence was hardly pronounced when 

 the lost horse and spaniel were found. So the judges were under the painful 

 necessity of reconsidering their decision; but they fined Zadig four hundred 

 ounces of gold for saying that he had seen that which he had not seen. 



The first thing was to pay the fine; afterward Zadig was permitted to open 

 his defense to the court, which he did in the following terms : 



" Stars of justice, abysses of knowledge, mirrors of truth, whose gravity is as 

 that of lead, whose inflexibility is as that of iron, who rival the diamond in 

 clearness, and possess no little affinity with gold ; since I am permitted to ad- 

 dress your august assembly, I swear by Ormuzd that I have never seen the 

 respectable lady dog of the queen, nor beheld the sacrosanct horse of the King 

 of kings. 



"This is what happened : I was taking a walk toward the little wood near 

 which I subsequently had the honor to meet the venerable chief eunuch and 

 the most illustrious grand huntsman. I noticed the track of an animal in the 

 sand, and it was easy to see that it was that of a small dog. Long faint 

 streaks upon the little elevations of sand between the foot-marks convinced me 

 that it was a she-dog, with pendent dugs showing that she must have had 



