CHAPTER X

MORDECAI PRIME MINISTER

1.  And the king Ahasuerus laid a tribute upon the land, and upon the isles of the sea.

2.  And all the acts of his power and of his might, and the declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, whereunto the king advanced him, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia?

3.  For Mordecai the Jew was next unto king Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted of the multitude of his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to all his seed.

II.  THE HISTORY OF ALI BABA AND THE FORTY ROBBERS[*]

[* From “The Arabian Nights.”]

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

[Setting.  This story, like “Esther,” takes place in Persia.  The stories of “The Arabian Nights” as a whole probably originated in India, were modified and augmented by the Persians, and had the finishing touches put upon them by the Arabians.  Bagdad on the Tigris is the city that figures most prominently in the stories, and the good caliph Haroun Al-Raschid (or Alraschid), who ruled from 786 to 809, A.D., is the monarch most often mentioned.

“A goodly place, a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
  Of good Haroun Alraschid.”

However old the germs of the stories are, the form in which we have them hardly antedates the year 1450.  The absence of all mention of coffee and tobacco precludes, at least, a date much later.  They began to be translated into the languages of Europe during the reign of Queen Anne and, with the exception of the Old Testament, have been the chief orientalizing influence in modern literature.  The setting of “Ali Baba” shows the four characteristics of all these Perso-Arabian tales:  it has to do with town life, not country life; it presupposes one faith, the Mohammedan; it shows a fondness for magic; and it takes for granted an audience interested not in moral or ethical distinctions but in story-telling for story-telling’s sake.

Plot.  The plot of the short story as a distinct type of literature has been said to show a steady progress from the impossible through the improbable and probable to the inevitable.  When we say of a story that the conclusion is inevitable we mean that, with the given background and characters, it could not have ended in any other way, just as, with a given multiplier and multiplicand, one product and only one is possible.  This cannot be said of “Ali Baba,” because the five parts are not linked together in a logical sequence as are the events in “The Gold-Bug,” or by any controlling idea of reform such as we find in “A Christmas Carol,” or by any underlying moral purpose like that which gives unity and dignity to “The Great Stone Face.”  These Perso-Arabian tales,