I Went out one night of the nights to the house of a friend and when it was the middle of the night, I sallied forth alone to hie me home. When I came into the road, I espied a sort of thieves and they espied me, whereupon my spittle dried up; but I feigned myself drunken and staggered from side to side, crying out and saying, "I am drunken." And I went up to the walls right and left and made as if I saw not the thieves, who followed me afoot till I reached my home and knocked at the door, when they went away. Some few days after this, as I stood at the door of my house, behold, there came up to me a young man, with a chain about his neck and with him a trooper, and he said to me, "O my lord, an alms for the love of Allah!" I replied, "Allah open!" And he looked at me a long while and cried, "That which you should give me would not come to the worth of your turband or your waistcloth or what not else of your habit, to say nothing of the gold and the silver which were about your person." I asked, "And how so?" and he answered, "On such a night, when you fell into peril and the thieves would have stripped you, I was with them and said to them, that man is my lord and my master who reared me. So was I and only I the cause of your deliverance and thus I saved you from them." When I heard this,

The Fourteenth Constable's History. 37

I said to him, "Stop;" and entering my house, brought him that which Allah Almighty made easy to me. So he went his way; and this is all I have to say. Then came forward the fourteenth constable and said, "Know that the tale I have to tell is rarer and pleasanter than this; and 'tis as follows."