Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/140

120 me with money, and all I have brought back with me I owe to God’s goodness and his. When I departed, he gave me great store of wealth and I returned home, with a heart at ease. I left him in luck and lordship, and belike there hath befallen him some calamity of the calamities of fortune, that hath enforced him leave his folk and country, and there hath happened to him by the way the like of what happened to me. There is nothing extraordinary in this; but now it behoveth me to requite him his generous dealing with me and do according to the saying of him who saith:

As they were talking, up came Ubeid, as he were Provost of the Merchants; whereupon they all rose to salute him and seated him in the place of honour. Then said Kemerezzeman to him, ‘O my friend, verily, thy day is blessed and fortunate! There is no need to relate to me a thing that befell me before thee. If the Bedouins have stripped thee and robbed thee of thy wealth, verily our money is the ransom of our lives; so let not thy soul be troubled; for I entered thy city naked and thou clothedst me and entreatedst me generously, and I owe thee many a kindness. But I will requite thee and do with thee even as thou didst with me, nay, more: so be of good heart and cheerful eye.’ And he went on to soothe him and hinder him from speech, lest he should name his wife and what she had done with him; nor did he cease to ply him with saws and moral instances and verses and conceits and stories and anecdotes and console him, till he took the hint and kept silence concerning the