Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 1.djvu/254

232 When the prefect heard the Jew’s story, he said to the hangman, ‘Let the controller go, and hang the Jew.’ So the hangman took the Jew and put the rope round his neck, when behold, the tailor pressed through the folk and cried out to him, ‘Hold thy hand! None killed him save I, and it fell out thus. I had been out a-pleasuring yesterday and coming back in the evening, met this hunchback, who was drunk and singing lustily to a tambourine. So I carried him to my house and bought fish, and we sat down to eat. Presently, my wife took a piece of fish and crammed it down the hunchback’s throat; but it went the wrong way and stuck in his gullet and choked him, so that he died at once. So we lifted him up, I and my wife, and carried him to the Jew’s house, where the girl came down and opened the door to us, and I said to her, “Give thy master this quarter-dinar and tell him that there are a man and a woman at the door, who have brought a sick person for him to see.” So she went in to tell her master, and whilst she was gone, I carried the hunchback to the top of the stair, where I propped him up, and went away with my wife. When the Jew came out, he stumbled over him and thought that he had killed him.’ Then he said to the Jew, ‘Is not this the truth?’ ‘It is,’ replied the Jew. And the tailor turned to the prefect and said, ‘Let the Jew go, and hang me.’ When the prefect heard the tailor’s story, he wondered at the adventure of the hunchback and exclaimed, ‘Verily, this is a matter that should be recorded in books!’ Then he said to the hangman, ‘Let the Jew go, and hang the tailor on his own confession.’ So the hangman took the tailor and put the rope round his neck, saying, ‘I am tired of taking this man and loosing that, and no one hanged after all.’

Now the hunchback in question was the favourite buffoon of the Sultan, who could not bear him out of his sight: so when he got drunk and did not make his appearance