A free boy and a slave girl once learned together in school, and the boy fell passionately in love with the girl. —

When it was the Three Hundred and Eighty fifth night

the lad fell passionately in love with the slave girl. So one day, when the other boys were heedless, he took her tablet and wrote on it these couplets:

What say you of him by sickness waste, Until he's clean distraught for love of you? Who in the transport of his pain complains, Nor can bear load of heart in secrecy?

Now when the girl took her tablet, she read the verses written on it and, understanding them, wept from pity for him. Then she wrote beneath these two couplets:

An if we behold a lover love fordone Desiring us, our favours he shall see: Yea, what he wills of us he shall obtain, And so befall us what befalling be."

Now it chanced that the teacher came in on them and, taking the tablet unnoticed, read what was written on it. So he was moved to pity of their case and wrote on the tablet beneath those already written these two couplets addressed to the girl:

"Console your lover, fear no consequence; He is daft with loving lowe's insanity; But for the teacher fear not anything from him, Love pain he learned long before learnt you."

Presently, it so happened that the girl's owner entered the school about the same time and, finding the tablet, read the above verses written by the boy, the girl, and the schoolmaster. He wrote under them these two couplets:

"May Allah never make you parting dree And be your censurer shamèd weanly! But for the teacher never, By God, eye Of mine beheld a bigger pimp than he!"

Then he sent for the Kazi and witnesses and married them on the spot. Moreover, he made them a wedding feast and treated them with exceeding munificence. And they did not stop abiding together in joy and happiness until there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies. And equally pleasant is the story of