But occasionally ladies are represented as giving witty retorts, as in the story of the Persian lady who, walking in the street, observed a man following her, and turning round enquired of him:  “Why do you follow me, sir?” He answered:  “Because I am in love with you.”  “Why are you in love with me?” said the lady.  “My sister is much handsomer than I; she is coming after me—­go and make love to her.”  The fellow went back and saw a woman with an exceedingly ugly face, upon which he at once went after the lady, and said to her:  “Why did you tell me what was not true?” “Neither did you speak the truth,” answered she; “for if you were really in love with me, you would not have turned to see another woman.”  And the Persian poet Jami, in his Baharistan, relates that a man with a very long nose asked a woman in marriage, saying:  “I am no way given to sloth, or long sleeping, and I am very patient in bearing vexations.”  To which she replied:  “Yes, truly:  hadst thou not been patient in bearing vexations thou hadst not carried that nose of thine these forty years.”

The low estimation in which women are so unjustly held among Muhammedans is perhaps to be ascribed partly to the teachings of the Kuran in one or two passages, and to the traditional sayings of the Apostle Muhammad, who has been credited (or rather discredited) with many things which he probably never said.  But this is not peculiar to the followers of the Prophet of Mecca:  a very considerable proportion of the Indian fictions represent women in an unfavourable light—­fictions, too, which were composed long before the Hindus came in contact with the Muhammedans.  Even in Europe, during mediaeval times, maugre the “lady fair” of chivalric romance, it was quite as much the custom to decry women, and to relate stories of their profligacy, levity, and perversity, as ever it has been in the East.  But we have changed all that in modern times:  it is only to be hoped that we have not gone to the other extreme!—­According to an Arabian writer, cited by Lane, “it is desirable, before a man enters upon any important undertaking, to consult ten intelligent persons among his particular friends; or if he have not more than five such friends let him consult each twice; or if he have not more than one friend he should consult him ten times, at ten different visits [he would be ‘a friend indeed,’ to submit to so many consultations on the same subject]; if he have not one to consult let him return to his wife and consult her, and whatever she advises him to do let him do the contrary, so shall he proceed rightly in his affair and attain his object."[25] We may suppose this Turkish story, from the History of the Forty Vezirs, to be illustrative of the wisdom of such teaching:  A man went on the roof of his house to repair it, and when he was about to come down he called to his wife, “How should I come down?” The woman answered, “The roof is free; what would happen?  You are a young