[237] An abstract of this story will be found in the [Appendix].
[238] The carpenter is a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity: not content to vaunt his acquaintance with popular tales, he must add that his father daily passed by a famous school-house—implying that the knowledge supposed to be thus obtained by his parent had been transmitted to himself! The Kází is no doubt “all there,” but for his love of money and jealousy of his artful wife. We have the authority of a certain noble poet that avarice is “a good old-gentlemanly vice”; but nobody can say a word in favour of jealousy, the “green-eyed monster,” who caused the death of sweet Desdemona.
[239] “Put a feather in his bonnet” is not quite the Eastern expression, though its meaning is thus fairly enough rendered in English: the carpenter may be said, in Biblical phrase, to have “exalted his horn”—as the poet Burns has it in his verses on his first visit to Lord Dare, “up higher yet my bannet!” We used also to say of a man who evidently thought highly of himself that he “cocked his beaver.”
[240] We have also seen in the story of Sháh Manssur, p. 18, how the unchaste woman made her husband believe that he was mad.—The Kází ascribes his imaginary ailment to over-eating, but also, as I understand it, to the fact that the food of which he partook too freely had been baked in hog’s blood. Swine’s flesh is an abomination to the Muslim as to the Jew, though the law allows the former to eat any kind of food if he be pressed by hunger and nothing else can be procured. Possibly the worthy Kází at the time he was in the house of the deceased Kávas the Armenian—where hog’s flesh and hog’s blood might well be found—thought that his condition, as to appetite, justified his eating of the “funeral baked meats,” though partly composed of the unclean animal.
[241] The muezzin was proclaiming the hour of prayer.
[242] Iblís: Satan. Possibly Iblís is a corruption of Diabolus.—Artful, intriguing women are often described as being able to pull out the Devil’s claws, and Satan himself would confess there was no escaping from their cunning!
[243] There is an omission in this tale which leaves it practically pointless, since it is not apparent how the lady’s words, “I remember,” should have sent her husband away without his having opened the chest. Much the same tale occurs in Mr. Gibb’s translation of the Turkish story-book, Qirq vezír taríkhí (“History of the Forty Vazírs,” p. 401), in which a man and his wife are playing the game yad est, or “I remember”—a game that may continue for days, and even weeks, the conditions being that neither must accept of anything from the other without saying, “I remember”; should one of them do so, the other on repeating these words becomes entitled to a forfeit. In the Turkish story, as, quite obviously, in the foregoing, the husband has taken a yad est with his wife, and is led by the latter to believe that she had made these preparations as for a feast, and trumped up the story about having concealed her lover in the chest, in order to take him by surprise when she should give him the key, and by his omitting to say “I remember” she should win the forfeit.
[244] Sumbul: Hyacinth, the name of the youth.
[245] An order of religious mendicants.
[246] Narkis: Narcissus, the name of one of his servants.