I went out one night to the house of one of my friends and when
it was the middle of the night, I sallied forth alone [to go
home]. When I came into the road, I espied a sort of thieves and
they saw 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 till I reached
my house and knocked at the door, when they went away.
Some days after this, as I stood at the door of my house, 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, charity for the
love of God!" Quoth I, "God open!"[FN#147] and he looked at me a
long while and said, "That which thou shouldst give me would not
come to the value of thy turban or thy waistcloth or what not
else of thy raiment, to say nothing of the gold and the silver
that was about thee." "How so?" asked I, and he said, "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 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 God the Most High made easy [to me].[FN#148] So he went his
way. And this is my story.'
Then came forward the fourteenth officer and said, 'Know that the
story I have to tell is pleasanter and more extraordinary than
this; and it is as follows.