Aladdin took his mother’s advice, and ate and drank moderately. When he had done, “Mother,” said he to her, “I cannot help complaining of you, for abandoning me so easily to the discretion of a man who had a design to kill me, and who at this very moment thinks my death certain. You believed he was my uncle, as well as I; and what other thoughts could we entertain of a man who was so kind to me, and made such advantageous offers? But I must tell you, mother, he is a rogue and a cheat, and only did what he did, and made me all those promises, to accomplish my death; but for what reason neither you nor I can guess.—For my part, I can assure you I never gave him any cause to deserve the least ill-treatment from him. You shall judge of it yourself, when you have heard all that passed from the time I left you, till he came to the execution of his wicked design.” Then Aladdin began to tell his mother all that happened to him from Friday, when the magician took him to see the palaces and gardens about that town, and what fell out in the way, till they came to the place between the two mountains, where the great prodigy was to be performed; how, with incense which the magician threw into the fire, and some magical words which he pronounced, the earth opened, and discovered a cave which led to an inestimable treasure. He forgot not the blow the magician gave him, and in what manner he softened again, and engaged by great promises, and putting a ring on his finger, to go down into the cave. He did not omit the least circumstance of what he saw in crossing the three halls and the garden and his taking the wonderful lamp, which he pulled out of his bosom and shewed to his mother, as well as the transparent fruit of different colours, which he had gathered in the garden as he returned, two purses full of which he gave to his mother. But though these fruits were precious stones, brilliant as the sun, and the reflection of a lamp which then lighted the room might have led them to think they were of great value, she was as ignorant of their worth as her son, and cared nothing for them. She had been bred in a middling rank of life, and her husband’s poverty prevented her being possessed of such things, nor had she, or her relations or neighbours ever seen them, so that we must not wonder that she looked on them as things of no value, and only pleasing to the eye by the variety of their colours.