183
with him and kept his accounts and ordered his incomings and outgoings for a month, at the end of which time he found his receipts increased and his expenses lessened; wherefore he thanked me and made my wage a dirhem a day. When the year was out, he proposed to me to marry his daughter and become his partner in the shop. I agreed to this and went in to my wife and applied me to the shop. But I was broken in heart and spirit, and grief was apparent upon me; and the grocer used to drink and invite me thereto, but I refused for melancholy.
On this wise I abode two years, till, one day, as I sat in the shop, there passed by a company of people with meat and drink, and I asked the grocer what was to do. Quoth he, ‘This is the day of the pleasure-makers, when all the musicians and dancers of the town go forth with the young men of fortune to the banks of the Ubulleh river[1] and eat and drink among the trees there. My heart prompted me to divert myself with the sight of this thing and I said in myself, ‘Belike, I may foregather with her I love among these people.’ So I told the grocer that I had a mind to this and he said, ‘Up and go with them.’ And he made me ready meat and drink and I went till I came to the Ubulleh river, when, behold, the folk were going away.
I was about to follow, when I espied the very bark in which the Hashimi had been with the damsel going along the river and the captain in her. So I cried out to him and he and his company knew me and took me on board with them and said to me, ‘Art thou yet alive?’ And they embraced me and questioned me of my case. So I told them my story and they said, ‘Indeed, we thought
- ↑ A canal so called, branching off from the Tigris and leading from Bassora to an adjacent town of the same name. Its banks are a favourite pleasure-resort of the townsfolk, and it is said by the Arabs to be one of the four most delightful places in the world, the three others being situate at Damascus, Shiraz and Samarcand respectively.
