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And he adds:

'Wherefore,' he says, 'drink ye, and fatten in merriment, O ye of humankind!' and this I said to Baba Mustapha when he had received plenteous thwackings, touched with pity for his state; but he refused consolation, dwelling in verse on the delights of Shiraz, the honours awarded to barbercraft there. Now on a day, as he paced the felons' prison in a moment of dejection, I was by, and heard him call on the name of Shibli Bagarag as one absent, missing, and to whom he was indebted for divers thwackings, ignominies, and maltreatments: so I said to him, "What of the youth Shibli Bagarag?"

And he answered, "This of him, O Vizier: that but for him and my search after him I were now in the centre of the adulations of Shiraz; the good-for-nothing fellow! he whom the Evil One possessed with the idea of arriving at great things,—and the readers of planets! And but for him and his wilfulness, and his wandering and his accursed ambition and dissatisfaction with his born state, the head of the Shah, the high potentate, sovereign of the earth, that head which blindeth men, were even now a familiar thing beneath my hands, I operating on him, pouring