beggar-woman in the street, whose whole appearance,
        though most distressing, bore distinct traces of former
        greatness.  Joseph approached her compassionately, and
        held out to her a handful of gold.  But she refused it,
        and said aloud:  “Great prophet of Allah, I am unworthy
        of this gift, although my transgression has been the
        stepping-stone to thy present fortune.”  At these words
        Joseph regarded her more closely, and, behold, it was
        Zulaykha, the wife of his lord.  He inquired after her
        husband, and was told that he had died of sorrow and
        poverty soon after his deposition.  On hearing this,
        Joseph led Zulaykha to a relative of the king, by whom
        she was treated like a sister, and she soon appeared to
        him as blooming as at the time of his entrance into her
        house.  He asked her hand of the king, and married her,
        with his permission.

Zulaykha was the name of Potiphar’s wife, if we may believe Muhammedan legends, and the daughter of the king of Maghrab (or Marocco), who gave her in marriage to the grand vazir of the king of Egypt, and the beauteous princess was disgusted to find him, not only very old, but, as a modest English writer puts it, very mildly, “belonged to that unhappy class which a practice of immemorial antiquity in the East excluded from the pleasures of love and the hope of posterity.”  This device of representing Potiphar as being what Byron styles “a neutral personage” was, of course, adopted by Muslim traditionists and poets in order to “white-wash” the frail Zulaykha.—­There are extant many Persian and Turkish poems on the “loves” of Yusuf wa Zulaykha, most of them having a mystical signification, and that by the celebrated Persian poet Jami is universally considered as by far the best.

Joseph and his Brethren.

Wonderful stories are related of Joseph and his brethren.  Simeon, if we may credit the Talmudists, must have been quite a Hercules in strength.  The Biblical narrative of Simeon’s detention by his brother Joseph is brief but most expressive:  “And he turned himself about from them and wept; and returned to them again, and communed with them, and took from them Simeon, and bound him before their eyes."[69] The Talmudists condescend more minutely regarding this interesting incident:  When Joseph ordered seventy valiant men to put Simeon in chains, they had no sooner approached him than he roared so loud that all the seventy fell down at his feet and broke their teeth!  Joseph then said to his son Manasseh:  “Chain thou him”; whereupon Manasseh dealt Simeon a single blow and immediately overpowered him; upon which Simeon exclaimed:  “Surely this was the blow of a kinsman!”—­When Joseph sent Benjamin to prison, Judah cried so loud that Chushim, the son of Dan, heard him in Canaan and responded.  Joseph feared for his life, for Judah was so enraged that he wept blood.  Some say that Judah wore five garments, one over the other; but when he was angry his heart swelled so much that his five garments burst open.  Joseph cried so terribly that one of the pillars of his house fell in and was changed into sand.  Then Judah said:  “He is valiant, like one of us.”