"'"However that may be," said the man, "if by talking with your customers you can discover this little brush, and procure it for me, I will give you a good price for it."
"'"What do you call a good price?" I inquired.
"'"I will give you," he said, "ten dinars for it."
"'He looked at me very hard, to observe what effect this offer would produce, for no doubt, in spite of my denial, he suspected that I had picked up the brush. But I reflected that the brush must have some very special value, or he would not so readily have offered ten dinars for it. If I held back, by and by he would offer twenty.
"'I therefore answered quietly—"It is a large sum for a small brush, if I should hear of it I will let you know."
"'"In a week or ten days I will come again," he said, "perhaps by that time you may be able to find it."
"'He probably named a week or ten days in order not to appear too eager, and also to give me time to pretend to have succeeded in my search.
"'A week passed and a fortnight, and still he did not return. Indeed he never came back, and whether he was captured by the police—for I have no doubt he was one of the thieves who had robbed the old miser—or whether he and his gang had been obliged on account of some other crime to fly from Bagdad, I do not know; one thing only is certain, I have never seen him again.
"'Nearly three months had elapsed, and I had almost ceased to expect the reappearance of the man, and even to regret that I did not accept his offer of ten dinars for the brush at the time he made it, when one afternoon, a few days ago, a man came to me suffering from a growth or wen on the back of his neck, close to the spinal cord. He desired that I should paint this with a certain remedy or lotion I have for such tumours. Finding the lotion, which I had not used for some time, but not the brush with which I was accustomed to apply it, I took hold of the little brush which I had picked up, and made use of that. The hairs of this brush were so much longer than those in my old brush, that I had not proceeded far before I happened accidentally to pass the wet brush across the spine. Immediately the man became fixed in the attitude in which he happened to be as I was operating upon him. His features retained the expression precisely which they wore at the moment the wet brush had touched the spine, and, in short, the man was in a trance exactly similar to that in which I had found the old miser three months before.
"'I had discovered the virtues of the brush. At first I was a good deal frightened, not knowing how long the trance might continue. However, after the lapse of twelve hours, the man recovered consciousness again, and the complete use of all his faculties just as suddenly as the old miser had done three months previously.