BETWIXT CUP AND LIP Now it may indeed seem that all our little Heir-to-Empire's troubles were over; but there is still somewhat to tell of our young hero.

To begin with, Queen Humeeda was a wise woman, and she saw that it was not good for the little lad to be always at play.

She knew that as a King's son in the East, he would have small time after he was ten for schooling, and as he was now close on four that did not leave many years for teaching.
So a tutor was found for him; but it is to be feared that he was by no means an industrious scholar.

Indeed, we hear of such dreadful things as playing truant, so that when a day was fixed for an examination by learned men as to how the Heir-to-Empire was getting on with his studies, "at the master moment it was found that the scholar, having attired himself for sport, had disappeared!" Then his first tutor was dismissed because he encouraged his pupil in pigeon flying, and we read of his applying his thoughts more to dog-fancying and Arab horses than to his books.

Still he did learn one thing, and a good thing, too.
The day he was four years and four days old he was taught, as all little Mohammedans are taught, to understand _what_ he was, _what_ the world about him was, and to recognise that neither he himself, nor the world he lived in were the Beginning and the End of all things.