But let none say that, in the regions of the merry Orient, fairies and wonders do not still make their home among men. Just when the beys had consumed the price of the last slave they had to sell, such wealth poured in upon them, in heaps, in floods, as we only hear of in old fairy tales; and fairy tales, as we all know very well, have no truth in them at all. * * * * * One day, as Ali Pasha was walking to and fro on the bastions of Janina, he perceived among the garden-beds in the court-yard below a gardener engaged in planting tulips. Tepelenti knew all the servants in the fortress thoroughly, down to the very lowest. He not only knew them by name, but he knew what they had to do and how they did it. The name of this gardening slave was Dirham, and he was so named because, many years before Mukhtar had purchased him when a child from a slave-dealer for a dirham, and although his master often plagued him, he nevertheless cared for him well, and brought him up and provided him with all manner of good things. Thus Dirham, whenever his master's name was mentioned, bethought him how little he was worth when Mukhtar Bey bought him, and how many more dirhams he was worth now, and for all this he could not thank Mukhtar enough. Ali Pasha for a long time watched from the bastions this man planting his tulips. Some of them he pressed down into the ground very carefully, strewing them with loose powdery earth, preparing a proper place for the bulbs beforehand, and moistening them gently with watery spray; others he plumped down into the earth anyhow, covering them up very perfunctorily, and never looking to see whether he watered them too much or too little. Ali carefully noted those bulbs which Dirham had bestowed the greatest pains upon, and then went down and entered into conversation with him. "What are the names of these tulips?" Dirham ticked them all off: King George, Trafalgar, Admiral Gruithuysen, Belle Alliance, etc., etc. But at the same time he skipped over one or two here and there, and these were the very ones which he had covered up with the greatest care. "Then thou dost not know the names of those others?" inquired Ali. "I have lost my memoranda, my lord, and I cannot remember all the names among so many." "Look, now, I know the names of these flowers. This is Sulaiman, that over there is Mukhtar Bey." Dirham cast himself on his face before the pasha. Ali had guessed well. Dirham remembered the two gentlemen just as a good dog remembers his master--they were ever in his mind. The wretched man fully expected that Ali would immediately tear these bulbs out of the ground and plant his own head there in their place.