“Yes, but it leads farther,” rejoined Auerbach, “and what pleases us, who listen, you may rest assured, with critical ears, cannot fail to please in more extended circles.”

Upon this foundation arose that delightful book, A Thousand and One Days in the Orient, which was the occasion of one of the most amusing mystifications and controversies that ever occupied the German literary world.

Friedrich Bodenstedt was born at Peine in Hanover, April 21, 1819.  Notwithstanding his precocious intellectuality and remarkable poetic talents, he was condemned by his parents to a mercantile career.  After a mournful apprenticeship he managed, however, to escape from this uncongenial employment, and pursued a course of study at Goettingen, Munich and Berlin, devoting himself chiefly to philology and history.  The year 1840 found him in Moscow as private tutor in the family of Prince Galitzin, and shortly after he published his first volume of poetry.  Later, he was appointed teacher of languages at the Tiflis Gymnasium, and the result of his learned investigations here were given to the world in his People of Caucasus, in which, however, were wholly thrust into the background poetical reminiscences evoked, as we have seen, by gifted and genial friends.

During his sojourn in Tiflis, the mountain-encompassed capital of Georgia, Bodenstedt undertook the study of the Tartar language, finding it to be a universally-employed means of communication with the many-tongued races of Caucasus.  Among the numerous teachers recommended to him, he selected one called Mirza-Schaffy, “the wise man of Gjaendsha,” being attracted to him partly because of his calm, dignified demeanor, partly because he possessed a sufficient knowledge of Russian, with which Bodenstedt was perfectly familiar, to render intercourse easy and agreeable.

Here it may not be amiss to observe that “Mirza” is a title which placed before a proper name signifies “scribe”—­after a name it designates a prince.  Thus, Mirza-Schaff[^y] means “Scribe Schaffy,” but Schaffy-Mirza would mean “Prince Schaffy.”  Each word, when pronounced separately, has the accent on the last syllable, but together they are pronounced as one word, with the accent on the final syllable.

The Tartars possess no such brilliant stores of literature as the Persians, but they are endowed with a manly vigor which the latter have lost.  Mirza-Schaffy was a Tartar by birth, nurtured with Persian culture, and was, when Bodenstedt made his acquaintance, in December, 1843, a man of some forty years of age, of very stately appearance and excessive neatness.  He wore a soft silken suit, about which he carelessly draped a blue Turkish cloak, while a tall black sheep-skin hat of sugar-loaf form adorned his shapely head.  A dark, well-tended beard framed his handsomely chiseled face, whose calm, earnest expression was heightened by the deep, rich hue of his complexion, and his large, serious eyes were void of the usual cunning of his class.  His high-heeled slippers, whose purity he miraculously preserved unimpaired when mud was at its height in the streets of Tiflis, he left always at the threshold of his pupil’s room, pressing carpet and divan only with his immaculate variegated stockings.