“My brother, your worthy though impecunious father, has sufficiently grounded you in the essentials of our holy religion. You will not repine if you turn out to be one of the ninety-nine who end their lives in the gutter, rather than the blessed hundredth who attains, as I have attained, to the possession of a palace and of innumerable slaves. …”
Having so spoken the aged merchant bent for a moment in silent prayer and then proceeded:
“You will remember that at the conclusion of my last adventure I had reached a position, not of affluence, but at least of tolerable fortune. I was possessed of a train of camels, each heavily laden with two large panniers of dates, and drivers to conduct the whole.
“You will further remember how, on my arrival in Laknes, as I was anxious to make the best of my time I spoke freely to all of my merchandise, extolled its character, described how I intended to put it up for sale next day in the public markets, and spread abroad the name of Ishmaïl-of-Taftah which happened for the moment to be mine.
“The rumour spread (as I had intended it should). I strolled through the narrow streets of the town after sunset, and was glad to hear my arrival discussed, and my wares. I had promise for the morrow. I returned to my men.
“I had already spread out my bed upon the corner of the yard, when there came up a slave magnificently dressed, who bowed to the ground, and approaching my presence asked whether he had the honour and felicity to address the renowned merchant Ishmaïl. He bore an invitation from the greatest merchant in the city, whose name I had already heard half a dozen times in Taftah, and whom all the merchants there revered from afar for his enormous riches: a certain Yusouff ben Ahmed, also called ‘El-Zafari,’ or the Triumphant.
“Late as was the hour I purchased finery; with my last gold I hired a donkey of strange magnificence, and arrived at the palace of Yusouff, dressed in a fashion which I could ill afford, but which I regarded as an investment.
“I had expected to find within this palace that admirable simplicity of manner which is inseparable from really great wealth: Nor was I disappointed. The inner room to which I was led, encrusted everywhere with black marble, boasted no ornament save three white alabaster jars as tall as a man and of immense antiquity. They had formerly been the property of a young noble whom Yusouff had ruined, and he had them of the Sultan. In the midst shone the single pure flame of a massive silver lamp, rifled from the tomb of a saint. It now hung dependent from a chain of the same metal, the height of which was lost in the gloom of the lofty cupola.
“A fountain of scented water—I could not name its odour precisely, but I guessed it to be Fior de Goyim—plashed gently into a basin of porphyry at the end of the apartment.
“Yusouff and two other guests (who alone had been asked to meet me), rose from the exceedingly costly rugs of Persia whereon they had reclined, and gravely saluted me. The master of the house, after the first salutations and an invocation upon my head of the Mercy of Allah, told me that the feast was ready prepared, but that before summoning it he would ask me to honour the house and survey what poor ornaments he might be able to show me.
“I was expressly delighted at his tone. It was that which I had already heard to be native to princes of commerce. He had already acquired, in the few years that had elapsed since he had cleaned the streets for a living, a well-bred restraint of gesture, and when he spoke it was in the tone of one who thought negligible the whole world, including his guest. I prayed fervently, as I accompanied the leisurely steps of my great entertainer, that when I should have achieved a similar fortune I should myself as quickly acquire this distinctive manner of the great. I watched him narrowly in order to imitate (when I should have left his presence) those peculiar little details which mark affluence and are of such service in negotiation. He would often interpose words of his own into the midst of another’s sentence. It pleased him not to answer some repeated question. He would change the conversation at his pleasure without too much regard for what I might have been saying immediately before. He also turned to another guest, while I was addressing him and in every way showed his superiority.
“When we had sat down to meat I was further edified by the varied information, the extensive culture of my host. He would lead the talk on to some subject which he had recently acquired from his numerous secretaries, and dally upon it at a length which would have been tedious in one of lesser station. But all this was done with such an air of money that it was impossible to feel the slightest tedium, though his minute description of things which we all knew by heart extended more than once to a full quarter of an hour.
“During the progress of this divine repast I
