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Updated: May 3, 2025
The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness, rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside. The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city, located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two years before.
"It shall be done," said the Genie, and, waving his hand, the road where they stood was instantly filled with armed men, with swords and helmets gleaming and flashing in the sun, and all seated upon magnificently caparisoned horses. "Can I serve my lord further?" asked the Genie. "No," said Abdallah the fagot-maker, in admiration, "I have nothing more to wish for in this world.
The noise and confusion of the many voices shouting and calling, the trample and stamp of horses, grew fainter and fainter, until at last all was once more hushed and still, and only the fagot-maker was left behind, still staring like one dumb and bereft of wits. But so soon as he was quite sure that all were really gone, he clambered down as quickly as might be.
"I think," said Abdallah, "that I could eat more comfortably if you were away." "To hear is to obey," said the Genie. "Whither shall I go? Shall I enter the casket again?" "I do not know," said the fagot-maker; "how did you come to be there?" "I am a great Genie," answered the monster, "and was conjured thither by the great King Solomon, whose seal it is that thou wearest upon thy finger.
The fagot-maker grew at last quite out of patience, for she repeated twenty times that he would repent of it, and that she was in the right. He threatened to beat her if she did not hold her tongue. The fagot-maker was, perhaps, more sorry than his wife, but she teased him so he could not endure it. She wept bitterly, saying: "Alas! where are my children now, my poor children?"
Now had that wise man been by the wise man who had laughed so when the poor young fagot-maker wept and wailed at the ingratitude of his friend the wise man who had laughed still louder when the young fagot-maker vowed that in another case he would not have been so ungrateful to one who had benefited him how that wise man would have roared when he heard the casket plump into the waters of the well!
"Nay," said the young fagot-maker, "I believe not a word of what you say. Had I been in his place I would have been grateful for the benefits, and not have hated the giver." But the wise man only laughed louder than ever. "Maybe you will have the chance to prove what you say some day," said he, and went his way, still shaking with his merriment.
Misfortunes, they say, never come single, and so it seemed to be with the fagot-maker that day; for that happened that had never happened to him before he lost his way in the woods. On he went, deeper and deeper into the thickets, driving his ass before him, bewailing himself and rapping his head with his knuckles.
He was, however, the most bright and discreet of all the brothers; and if he spoke little, he heard and thought the more. There came a very bad year, and the famine was so great that these poor people resolved to rid themselves of their children. One evening, when they were in bed, and the fagot-maker was sitting with his wife at the fire, he said to her, with his heart ready to burst with grief:
By morning every copper of what had been given to the elder fagot-maker was gone, and he had never had such a good time in his life before. All that day and for a week the head of Ali was so full of the memory of the merry night that he had enjoyed that he could think of nothing else.
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