But for the teacher fear not aught from him; ✿ Love-pain he learnèd long before learnt ye.
Presently it so happened that the girl’s owner entered the school about the same time and, finding the tablet, read the above verses indited by the boy, the girl and the schoolmaster; and wrote under them these two couplets:—
May Allah never make you parting dree ✿ And be your censurer shamèd wearily!
But for the teacher ne’er, by Allah, eye ✿ Of mine beheld a bigger pimp than he!
Then he sent for the Kazi and witnesses and married them on the spot. Moreover, he made them a wedding-feast and treated them with exceeding munificence; and they ceased not abiding together in joy and happiness, till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies. And equally pleasant is the story of
[104]. Arab. “Lauh.” A bit of thin board washed white used for lessons as slates are amongst us, and as easily cleaned because the inks contain no minerals. It is a long parallelogram with triangular ears at the short sides; and the shape must date from ages immemorial as it is found, throughout Syria and its adjoinings, in the oldest rock inscriptions to which the form serves as a frame. Hence the “abacus” or counting table derives from the Gr. ἄβαζ a slab (or in Phenician “sand”), dust or sand in old days having been strewed on a table or tablet for schoolboys’ writings and mathematical diagrams.
AL-MUTALAMMIS AND HIS WIFE UMAYMAH.
It is related that Al-Mutalammis[[105]] once fled from Al-Nu’uman bin Munzir[[106]] and was absent so long that folk deemed him dead. Now he had a beautiful wife, Umaymah by name, and her family urged her to marry again; but she refused, for that she loved her husband Al-Mutalammis very dearly. However, they were urgent with her, because of the multitude of her suitors, and importuned her till she at last consented, albe reluctantly; and they espoused her to a man of her own tribe. Now on the night of the wedding, Al-Mutalammis came back and, hearing in the camp a noise of pipes and tabrets and seeing signs of a wedding festival, asked some of the children what was the merry making, to which they replied, “They have married Umaymah wife of Al-Mutalammis, to such an one, and he goes in to her this night.” When he heard this, he planned to enter the house amongst the mob of women and saw the twain seated on the bridal couch.[[107]] By and by, the bridegroom came up to her, whereupon she sighed heavily and weeping, recited this couplet:—
Would Heaven I knew (but many are the shifts of joy and woe) ✿ In what far distant land thou art, my Mutalammis, oh!