(Quoth he) 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.[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 than this; and ’tis as follows.”