"Most magnanimous Sultan," answered Codindo, "the prince, born of parents equally illustrious and happy, can have no other than a great and fortunate destiny: but I should impose on your highness, if I plumed myself with a science which I do not possess. The stars rise and set for me as for the rest of mankind; and I am not more enlightened in futurity by their means, than the most ignorant of your subjects." "But," replied the Sultan, "are you not an astrologer?" "Magnanimous prince," answered Codindo, "I have not that honour." "What the devil are you then?" says the old, but passionate Erguebzed. "An Aruspex! By the heavens I did not imagine, that you had so much as thought of it. Believe me, Seigneur Codindo, suffer your poultry to feed in quiet, and pronounce on the fate of my son, as you lately did on the cold of my wife's parrot." Codindo immediately drew a glass out of his pocket, took the infant's left ear, rubb'd his eyes, turn'd his spectacles again and again, peep'd at that ear, did the like to the right ear, and pronounced, "that the young prince's reign would be happy, if it proved long." "I understand you," replied Erguebzed: "my son will do the finest things in the world, if he has time. But, zounds! what I want to have told me is, that he will have time. What matter is it to me, after he is dead, that he would have been the greatest prince upon earth, had he lived. I have sent for you to cast my son's horoscope, and you make me his funeral oration." Codindo assured the prince, that he was sorry he was not more knowing; but beseeched his highness to consider, that his knowledge was sufficient for the little time he had been a conjurer. In effect, the moment before, what was Codindo? CHAP. II. _Education of Mangogul._ I will pass lightly over Mangogul's first years. The infancy of princes is the same with that of the rest of mankind; with this difference, however, that princes have the gift of saying a thousand pretty things, before they can speak. Thus before Erguebzed's son was full four years old, he furnished matter for a volume of Mangogulana. Erguebzed, who was a man of sense, and was resolved that his son's education should not be so much neglected as his own had been, sent betimes for all the great men in Congo; as, painters, philosophers, poets, musicians, architects, masters of dancing, mathematicks, history, fencing, &c. Thanks to the happy dispositions of Mangogul, and to the constant lessons of his masters, he was ignorant in nothing of what a young prince is wont to learn the first fifteen years of his life; and at the age of twenty he could eat, drink, and sleep, as completely as any potentate of his age.