"'I imagined, thro' attachment to the prejudices of my first education, that I should open to myself a safer, easier, and more agreeable career, if I preferr'd the part of humility to that of pride; and I offered myself with infantile bashfulness and winning supplications to all, whom I had the good fortune to meet. "'But oh! how unhappy are the times. After ten times more _buts_ and _ifs_ and _ands_ than were sufficient to make the most unemployed Toy lose all patience, my services were accepted. Alas! this job was of short duration. My first possessor giving himself up to the flattering glory of a new conquest, discarded me, and I found myself all at once out of employment. "'My treasure was gone, and I did not flatter myself that fortune would make me amends for it. In effect the vacant place was occupied, but not filled by a Sexagenarian, to whom good will was less wanting than the means. "'He laboured with all his might to make me forget my past state. He had for me all that behavior, which is esteemed polite and engaging in the career that I pursued: but his efforts did not conquer my regret. "'If industry, which is said never to fall short, made him find in the treasures of the natural faculty some abatement to my grief; this compensation to me appeared insufficient, in spite of my imagination, which was daily on the rack to find new resemblances, and even to suppose imaginary ones, but to no purpose. "'Such is the advantage of primacy, that it seizes the idea, and forms a barrier against every thing that would afterwards present itself under other forms: and such is, shall I say it, to our shame, the ungrateful nature of Toys, that they never take the good-will for the deed. "'This remark seems to me so natural, that, without being indebted to any body for it, I cannot think that I am the only one who has made it. But if any person before me has been struck with it; at least, gentlemen I am the first who undertake, by demonstrating it, to set its full value in a proper light. "'I am far from laying the least blame to the charge of those who have raised their voice hitherto, for having let this stroke escape them; my self-love being abundantly satisfied, to be able, after so great a number of orators, to present my observation as something new.--'" "Ah! prince," cried Mirzoza smartly, "I fancy I hear the chiromancer of the Manimonbanda. Apply to him, and you will have the subtile and critical explanation, of which you would in vain expect the agreeable present from any other person." The African author says, that Mangogul smiled, and continued. "But I do not intend," says he, "to relate the rest of his discourse. If this beginning has not given as much amusement as the first pages of _La Fée Taupe_, the sequel would be more tiresome than the last pages of the _Fée Moustache_." CHAP. XXXVII. _Mirzoza's dream._