"'I have assented, but I do not think it well.'

"They bred the youth in indulgence and affluence, and appointed an
accomplished tutor to educate him, and he became learned and gained
great applause in the sight of every one. The king smiled when the
vizier spoke of this, and said,--

"'Thou hast been nourished by our milk, and hast grown with us; who
afterwards gave thee intelligence that thy father was a wolf?'

"A few years passed;--a company of the vagrants of the neighborhood
were near; they connected themselves with the boy; a league of
association was formed; and, at an opportunity, the boy destroyed the
vizier and his children, carried off vast booty, and fixed himself in
the place of his father in the cavern of the robbers. The king bit the
hand of astonishment with the teeth of reflection, and said,--

"'How can any one make a good sword from bad iron? The worthless, O
Philosopher, does not, by instruction, become worthy. Rain, though not
otherwise than benignant, produces tulips in gardens and rank weeds in
nitrous ground.'"

Yet, notwithstanding Sadi and some other wise ones, here, as thieves,
are the faces of boys that cannot be naturally vicious,--boys of good
instincts, beyond all possible question,--and that only need a mother's
hand to smooth back the clustering hair from the forehead, to discover
the future residence of plentiful and upright reason. The face of a
boy, now in Sing Sing for burglary, and who bears a name which over the
continent of North America is identified with the ideas of large
combination and enterprise, is especially noticeable for the clear