to him: "Who is he?" He answered: "The wind." So he drew near to the wind, and said to him as he had said to the former ones. But the wind answered; "The mountain is mightier than I, for he can hide me by means of his loftiness." So he drew near to the mountain and said to him in like manner. The mountain answered: "The mouse is mightier than I, for he has dug a hole and a burrow in me, and I cannot make him depart from me." So the ascetic went to the mouse and said to him what he had said to the rest. [The mouse answered]: "It is impossible that this girl should be my wife, because she is taller and greater in stature than I, she could not go into my burrow with me." And the ascetic told his daughter his whole story. Then she begged her father to ask God to make her into a mouse, so that she might be able to marry the mouse. And the ascetic asked of God, and He changed his daughter to her first nature.
The two following anecdotes are also worth citing as the respective originals of (1) two well-known stories (Alnaschar and The Fakir and his pot of butter[1]) of the Arabian Nights, and (2) of the wide-spread legend of Beddgelert.
An ascetic derived his nourishment from a king, that is, the governor of a town, every day so much oil (? ghee, i.e., clarified butter, Arab. semen) and so much honey. And whatever he had remaining he used to pour into an earthenware vessel, which he hung on a peg above the bedstead on which he slept. One day while sleeping on the bedstead, with the earthenware vessel full of oil and honey, he began to say within himself: "If I sold this honey and oil, I might sell it for a dinar, and with the dinar I might buy ten she-goats, and after five months they would have young, and after a lapse of five years these would have young, and their number would become very large, and I should buy two yoke of oxen and a cow, and I should sow my fields, and reap much corn, and amass much oil; and I should buy a certain number of servants and maid-servants; and when I had taken to myself a wife of beautiful appearance, and she had borne me a handsome son, I should instruct him, and he would be secretary to the king." Now in his hand was a staff, and while he was saying these things he kept brandishing the staff
- ↑ See Villon Society's edition, i. 303; viii. 193.
