Upon hearing this, the tailor stood with his mouth wide open, as if the doors of his understanding had just been unlocked.
"_Aman, aman,_ Mercy, mercy, O Aga!" cried Babadul to Mansouri, "I was ignorant of what I was saying. Who would have thought it? Ass, fool, dolt, that I am, not to have known better. _Bismillah!_ in the name or the Prophet, pray come to my house; your steps will be fortunate, and your slave's head will touch the stars."
"I am in a hurry, a great hurry," said Mansouri. "Where is the head, the head of the Aga of the Janissaries?"
When the tailor heard whose head it had been, and recollected what he and his wife had done with it, his knees knocked under him with fear, and he began to exude from every pore.
"Where is it, indeed?" said he. "Oh! what has come upon us! Oh! what cursed _kismet_ (fate) is this?"
"Where is it?" exclaimed the slave, again and again, "where is it? speak quick!"
The poor tailor was completely puzzled what to say, and kept floundering from one answer to another until he was quite entangled as in a net.
"Then in the name of the Prophet what have you done with it? Have you ate it."
"Is it hiding at any other person's house?"
Then at last quite out of patience, the slave Mansouri took Babadul by his beard, and shaking his head for him, exclaimed with a roar, "Then tell me, you old dotard! what is it doing?"
"It is baking," answered the tailor, half choked: "I have said it."
"Baking! did you say?" exclaimed the slave, in the greatest amazement; "what did you bake it for? Are you going to eat it?"
"True, I said: what would you have more?" answered Babadul, "it is now baking." And then he gave a full account of what he and his wife had done in the sad dilemma in which they had been placed.
"Show me the way to the baker's," said Mansouri; "at least, we will get it in its singed state, if we can get it in no other. Whoever thought of baking the head of the Aga of the Janissaries? _Allah il allah!_"
They then proceeded to the baker Hassan's, who was now about taking his bread from his oven. As soon as he became acquainted with their errand, he did not hesitate in telling all the circumstances attending the transmission of the head from the pipkin to the barber's bracket; happy to have had an opportunity of exculpating himself of what might possibly have been brought up against him as a crime.