Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 1.djvu/249

227 fell in with a hunchback, the sight of whom would make the disappointed laugh and dispel chagrin from the sorrowful. So they went up to look at him and invited him to go home and make merry with them that night. He consented and accompanied them to their house; whereupon, the night being now come, the tailor went out to the market and buying fried fish and bread and lemon and conserve of roses by way of dessert, set them before the hunchback, and they ate. Presently, the tailor’s wife took a great piece of fish and cramming it into the hunchback’s mouth, clapped her hand over it, saying, ‘By Allah, thou must swallow it at one gulp; and I will give thee no time to chew it.’ So he bolted it; but there was a great bone in it, which stuck in his gullet, and his hour being come, it choked him, and he died at once. When the tailor saw this, he exclaimed, ‘There is no power and no virtue but in God! Alas, poor wretch, that he should have come by his death at our hands!’ ‘Why dost thou waste time in idle lamentation?’ rejoined his wife. ‘Hast thou not heard it said. . . . . ?’ And she repeated the following verses:

‘What is to be done?’ asked he; and she replied, ‘Rise and take the hunchback in thine arms and cover him with a silk handkerchief: then go out with him, and I will go before thee: and if thou meet any one, say, “This is my son: his mother and I are taking him to the doctor, that he may look at him.”’ So he rose and taking the hunchback in his arms, carried him along the streets, preceded by his wife, who kept saying, ‘O my son, God keep thee! Where has this smallpox attacked thee and in what part dost thou feel pain?’ So that all who saw them said, ‘It is a child ill of smallpox.’ They went