The fortieth is a quarrel between Abû Zayd and his handsome young wife, who go before the stingy judge of Tebrîz, he to complain of her contumacy, she of his abuse of his conjugal rights. The contention is remarkable, not only for the fury with which they rail at each other, but for the learning they display. “I married thee,” says Abû Zayd, “and found thee all that was bad. But I concealed thy faults, though if Shîrîn had given thee her beauty, and Zobaydeh her riches, and Bilḳîs her throne, and Bûrân her bed, and Az Zebbâ her kingdom, and Râbi‘ah her piety, and Khindaf her glory, and Al Khansâ her poetry on her Ṣakhr, I would have hated thee to be my wife.” She answers, “O thou baser than Mâdir, with more vices than Abû Dulâmeh’s mule, know that if thou wert Al Ḥasan in utterance and admonition, Ash Sha‘bi in learning and memory, Al Khalîl in prosody and grammar, Jerîr in love song and satire, Ḳoss in purity of speech and in discoursing, ‘Abd al Ḥamîd in eloquence and writing, Abû ‘Amr in Koran-reading and inflection, Ibn Ḳorayb in recitations from the Arabs, I would not keep thee.” The quarrel is, of course, a feigned one, and the wife’s address supplied by Abû Zayd himself. The rest of the adventure is of the usual kind.
The forty-first contains a sermon of Abû Zayd, by means of which he and his son extract money from the public. The forty-second contains riddles, not necessarily dependent like the conundrums of the thirty-sixth on the play of words, but indicating a thing by the description of it, as:—
What is he, who weds two sisters, both openly and secretly, but none accuses him for it?
When he visits the one, he visits also the other; and though husbands may be partial, he is not so.
He increases his visits as his wives grow gray: now, this is an affection rare among husbands.
The answer to this is, the pencil used to place the koḥl, or ointment, on the eyes: the two eyelids are the wives, each of which it anoints at the same time, without partiality, and as they grow old, the necessity for anointing them increases.
The forty-third has an adventure too long to relate,
and bears the name of the “Virgin and Matron,” because
it contains the reasons for and against marrying either
of these classes of ladies. The forty-fourth introduces
us to more riddles, which this time, however, depend
for their solution, like the legal questions of the thirty-
“I have seen Arabs in a barren year roast a rag for food, and it satisfied
them.”
“I have seen scribes, whose fingers never wrote a letter, and who
read not what is written in books.”
The forty-fifth like the fortieth is a quarrel between Abû
Zayd and his wife, before a judge, with the intention of
attracting his bounty. The forty-sixth is one of the most
elaborate in the work. Ḥârith being at Ḥimṣ (Emessa),
a place noted for the stupidity of its inhabitants, like
Abdera among the Greeks, sees a schoolmaster, one of a
class especially famous for their dulness, instructing his
pupils; he approaches, thinking to be entertained by the
poor man’s blunders, but finds to his astonishment that
the children were able to accomplish the most surprising
feats. One of them recites a poem consisting entirely of
unpointed letters; the next writes out some which not
only have every letter pointed, but are full of assonances
and alliterations; a third produces lines of which the
words consist alternately of pointed and unpointed letters;
a fourth gives verses in which there is tejnis or homogeneity
in sound or in letters between each two successive
words; the next produces a couplet, each line of
which begins and ends with the same syllables. Then
the nature of the exercises changes, and some lines are
given containing words which ought to be written with
the letter