GOING WESTWARD 225 



banished from the heart all anxiety and grief and 

 affliction," even when the finder is the son of a king 

 cutting wood in a forest, far from his lost home and 

 from those who know him as the son of a king. The 

 incognito appearances of the great Caliph make scenes of 

 the same class. A young man sits with his mistress, and 

 the sound of her lovely singing draws four darwishes to 

 the door; he descends and lets them in; they promise to 

 do him an immense and undreamed-of service — 



" Now these darwishes," says the tale, " were the 

 Khalifeh Harun Er-Rashid, and the Wezir Ja'far El- 

 Barmeki, and Abu-Nuwas El-Hasan, the son of Hani, 

 and Mesrur the Executioner." 



Then there is that page where Nimeh and the Persian 

 sage open a shop in Damascus, and stock it with costly 

 things, and the sage sits with the astrolabe before him, 

 *' in the apparel of sages and physicians " — to wait for 

 Nimeh's lover, or some one who has news of her, to 

 appear. Of a more subtly appealing charm is a sen- 

 tence in the story of " Ala-ed-din," where a man tells 

 the father of one who is supposed to have been executed 

 that another was actually slain in his stead, " for I 

 ransomed him, by substituting another, from among such 

 as deserved to be put to death." A good book might be 

 made of the stories of such poor unknown men in famous 

 books as this prisoner who was of those that deserved 

 to die. 



Lofty, strange, and infinite in its suggestiveness is the 

 tale of Kamar-ez-Zeman and the Princess Budur. Two 

 demons, an Efrit and an Efritch, contend as to the 

 superiority in beauty of a youth and a girl whom they 

 watch asleep in widely remote parts of the earth; and 

 Q 



