Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 6.djvu/322

294 Presently, up came a young merchant with whom fortune had played the tyrant and who could find no easier way of earning his livelihood than water-carrying. So he brought his wife’s bracelets to the Jew and said to him, ‘Give me the worth of these bracelets, that I may buy me an ass.’ ‘What wilt thou do with him?’ asked the Jew, and the other answered, ‘I mean to fetch water from the river on his back, and earn my living thereby.’ Quoth the Jew, ‘Take this ass of mine.’ So he sold him the bracelets and received Ali of Cairo in part payment, in the shape of an ass, and carried him home. Quoth Ali in himself, ‘If the ass-man clap the pannel on me and load me with water-skins and go half a score journeys a day with me, he will ruin my health and I shall die.’ So, when the water-carrier’s wife came to bring him his fodder, he butted her with his head and she fell on her back; whereupon he sprang on her and smiting her head with his mouth, put out that which his father left him. She cried out and the neighbours came to her assistance and beat him and drove him off her breast. When her husband came home, she said to him, ‘Either divorce me or return the ass to [his former] owner.’ ‘What has happened?’ asked he; and she answered, saying, ‘This is a devil in the guise of an ass. He sprang upon me, and had not the neighbours beaten him off me, he had done a foul thing with me.’

So he carried the ass back to the Jew, who said to him, ‘Why hast thou brought him back?’ and he replied, ‘He did a foul thing with my wife.’ So the Jew gave him his money again and he went away; and Azariah said to Ali, ‘Unlucky wretch that thou art, hast thou recourse to knavery to cause him return thee to me? But since it pleases thee to be an ass, I will make thee a laughing-stock to great and small.’ Then he mounted him and rode till he came without the city, when he brought out