“Know that my race, the Asra, are an ancient and powerful family, that have dwelt for many centuries in Yemen, the holy land. We are of high descent, and among us, at the time of the Hejira, was a follower of Mohammad, afterward one of the writers of the Koran, a venerable and a holy man, accounted a sage: by name, Hussen el-Asra. At the same time there lived in Mecca the high and holy Osman, compiler of the Koran, worshipped throughout the city as a saint. Now Hussen had a son, a young man of great beauty of face and form, and of highly virtuous mind, called Abdullah. One day this young man, by an unhappy accident, chanced to see a maiden, the daughter of a wealthy nobleman of Mecca, Said ibn-Alnas; and in the first sight of her he loved the maiden, and, going to her father, asked her hand in marriage. Said received Abdullah in the most courteous manner, but was distressed by the object of his visit, in that his daughter had already a suitor in old Osman, who, though four times married to virtuous women, had become so enamored of the beautiful Zenora that he purposed divorcing himself of one of his wives in order to marry her. Abdullah, however, was unmarried; and the venerable Said preferred to make his child the first wife of an honorable man, to bringing dishonor on the head of another woman by marrying her to Osman. Zenora, likewise, when the matter was laid before her, as is our custom with our women, begged earnestly to become the wife of the younger man, whom she already loved. Thereupon, before Osman was made aware of the matter, Zenora and Abdullah were safely married, and she had taken up her abode in the house of her husband and her husband’s father. “When news of this wedding was brought to the saint Osman, he fell into a violent rage of despair. Praying to the Prophet for vengeance, the Prophet listened to his prayer, and put into his mouth a curse. And so Osman went into the market-place and waited; and when Abdullah came thither, Osman went up to him and cursed him and his love, and the loves of his children and his children’s children, that whosoever of his race should truly love a woman should die of it, having by her no more than one son. And though an Asra should, in his heart, cherish love for a woman and not marry her, the curse should yet be upon him, till in a short time their whole race should perish from the face of the earth.” “It was an unholy curse,” observed the Rajah, deeply interested. And Fidá rejoined: