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During the winter there arrived another student from Germany, who, becoming acquainted with Bodenstedt, arranged to share with him the lessons in Tartar and Persian, which Mirza-Schaffy was pleased to call "hours of wisdom."
The Tartars possess no such brilliant stores of literature as the Persians, but they are endowed with a manly vigor which the latter have lost. Mirza-Schaffy was a Tartar by birth, nurtured with Persian culture, and was, when Bodenstedt made his acquaintance, in December, 1843, a man of some forty years of age, of very stately appearance and excessive neatness.
The song referred to was one hurled, as it were, at the head of an offending mullah who had derided Mirza-Schaffy for his tenderness to wine, and reads as follows: All other poems introduced into the Thousand and One Days in the Orient are entirely of Bodenstedt's own composition, were designed to add flavor to the picture of an Eastern divan of wisdom, and were usually written while the impression was fresh of intercourse with the wise man of Gjaendsha.
Hafisa's father demanded sight of it, had it interpreted by a learned mullah, and it proved to be a summons for the applicant to appear at an appointed hour for examination. This was too much. Mirza-Schaffy, the first wise man of the East, the pride of his race, the pearl in the shell of poetry, to be examined in his own language!
Nevertheless, the critics accepted them as translations from the Persian, and sharp lines of distinction were drawn between the poet, Mirza-Schaffy, and his translator, Friedrich Bodenstedt, not precisely to the advantage of the latter.
He was still speaking when a measured tread was heard in the ante-chamber, and Mirza-Schaffy himself drew near.
Numerous rivals envied Mirza-Schaffy his lessons, for each of which he was paid a whole silver ruble an unusually high tuition-fee. "And what is wisdom without song?" he exclaimed. "What is Mirza-Schaffy compared with me?"
Awake with blithesome touch the memories of your past: transport us into a new world where will be dispelled the gloom of the present." "Yes, do," chimed in the rest, drawing their chairs closer together. "Tell us, above all, of your famous teacher, Mirza-Schaffy," added Kaufmann.
In his excess of national modesty the wise man of Gjaendsha only styled himself the first wise man of the East, but since the children of the West dwelt under a dark cloud of unbelief, it resulted as a matter of course that he must be the wisest of all men. "I, Mirza-Schaffy," said he to his pupil, "am the first wise man of the East, consequently thou, as my disciple, art the second.
One dark evening, when the ladies had failed to appear on the housetop, as Mirza-Schaffy was turning disappointed away he was accosted by a closely-veiled female, who, bidding him follow her, led the way to a secluded spot where interruption would be improbable, and thus addressed him: "I am Fatima, the confidential attendant of Zuleikha.
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