THE latter part of this story will at once remind the reader of the tale of Alí Khoja and the Merchant of Baghdád in our common English version of the Arabian Nights,* in which Alí Khoja, before setting out on the pilgrimage to Makka, places a thousand gold pieces in a jar and fills it up with olives, and gives it into the custody of a merchant with whom he was intimate, as a jar of olives merely; and the merchant after the Khoja had prolonged his absence far beyond the usual time opened the jar to take out of it some olives for his wife, who had wished for that fruit, and finding the gold underneath abstracted it, and substituted fresh olives. The story is too well known to require the repetition of the subsequent details—how judgment was at first given in favour of the merchant, but was afterwards reversed, as in our story of the Kází, by the acuteness of a boy.
It seems to have been a favourite pastime from ancient times for Asiatic youngsters to play at “the King and his Ministers.” In the apocryphal Arabic gospel of the Saviour's Infancy we read: “In the month of Adar, Jesus, after the manner of a king, assembled the boys together. They spread their clothes on the ground and he sat down on them. Then they put on his head a crown made of flowers, and like chamber-servants stood in his presence, on the right and on the left, as if he was a king, and whoever passed that way was forcibly dragged by the boys, saying: ‘Come hither and adore the king; and then go away.’” This passage finds a very remarkable parallel in the Mongolian tales of Ardshi Bordshi—the second part of Miss Busk's Sagas from the Far East, derived from Jülg's Mongolische Märchen, as follows: “In the neighbourhood of his [i. e. Ardshi Bordshi's] residence was a hill where the boys who were tending the calves were wont to pass the time by running up and down. But they had also another custom, and it was that whichever of them won the race was king for the day—an ordinary game enough, only that when it was played in this place the boy-king thus constituted was at once endowed with such extraordinary importance and majesty that every one was constrained to treat him as a real king. He had not only ministers and dignitaries among his play-fellows, who prostrated themselves before him, and fulfilled all his behests, but whoever passed that way could not choose but pay him homage also.”
The Rev. J. Hinton Knowles, in a note to his Folk-Tales of Kashmír, thus describes the game of “Vazír Pádisháh,” also called “Suhul,” as it is played by the boys in Kashmír:
“It is generally played by four youngsters. Four little sticks are provided, of which the bark on one side is peeled off. Any of the four children throws first. If one should throw three sticks so that they all fall on the bark side, then he is appointed pádisháh, or king; but if not, they all try and throw till some one succeeds. The next thing is to find out the vazír. He who throws the sticks so that one of them falls with the bark side up, but the other three with the peeled sides up, is appointed to this office. Then an asúr, or thief, has to be fixed upon. He who throws so that two of his sticks fall with the bark side upwards is proclaimed the thief. Lastly a sayd, or honest man, has to be found. This part he has to play who throws the sticks so that three of them fall with the bark side upwards. If it should happen that all four of them fall with the bark sides up, that thrower has to try again.*
“Pádisháh, vazír, asúr, and sayd being known, the real play begins. The asúr, or thief, is brought before the king by the vazír, who says: ‘O king, peace and health to you; here is a thief.’ The king replies: ‘Whence has he come?’ Then the vazír tells him the whole case, and punishment has to be inflicted on the criminal. This is the most amusing part of the whole play. ‘Give him Bangálí cannon,’ says the king, and the vazír kicks the prisoner's buttocks; or the king says: ‘Bring a dog in his place from the Ladák,’ when the vazír takes the prisoner a short distance, and then holding him by the ear pulls him back, while the prisoner barks like a dog; or the king says: ‘Take out the spindle,’ when the vazír draws a line with his thumb-nail on the inside of the arm from the elbow-joint to the wrist, and then hits the arm over the line as hard as he can with the first and second fingers of his right hand. There are many other words of punishment too numerous to mention here.”
Not a few Eastern stories turn upon the wonderful acuteness of boys in solving difficult questions which have perplexed the profound minds of their “grave and reverend” seniors. The reader will find a number of examples cited in my Popular Tales and Fictions, vol. ii, pp. 10, 12-14, one of which, a Mongolian tale, is analogous to that of the Arabian story of Alí Khoja's “pot of olives.”