The Thirteenth Constable's History.



I went out one night of the nights to the house of a friend and
when it was the middle of the night, I sallied forth alone to hie
me home. When I came into the road, I espied a sort of thieves
and they espied me, whereupon my spittle dried up; but I feigned
myself drunken and staggered from side to side, crying out and
saying, "I am drunken." And I went up to the walls right and left
and made as if I saw not the thieves, who followed me afoot till
I reached my home and knocked at the door, when they went away.
Some few days after this, as I stood at the door of my house,
behold, there came up to me a young man, with a chain about his
neck and with him a trooper, and he said to me, "O my lord, an
alms for the love of Allah!" I replied, "Allah open!" and he
looked at me a long while and cried, "That which thou shouldst
give me would not come to the worth of thy turband or thy
waistcloth or what not else of thy habit, to say nothing of the
gold and the silver which were about thy person." I asked, "And
how so?" and he answered, "On such a night, when thou fellest
into peril and the thieves would have stripped thee, I was with
them and said to them, Yonder man is my lord and my master who
reared me. So was I and only I the cause of thy deliverance and
thus I saved thee from them." When I heard this, I said to him,
"Stop ;" and entering my house, brought him that which Allah
Almighty made easy to me.[FN#116] So he went his way; and this is
all I have to say. Then came forward the fourteenth constable and
said, "Know that the tale I have to tell is rarer and pleasanter