language, and from his long intercourse with the Moors
        doubtless became acquainted with Asiatic story-books. 
        His manner of telling the stories is, however, wholly
        his own, and some of them appear to be of his own
        invention.—­There is a variant of the same story in
        Pasquils Jests and Mother Bunches Merriments, in which
        a servant enters his master’s name in a list of all the
        fools of his acquaintance, because he had lately lent
        his cousin twenty pounds.

Everybody knows the story of the silly old woman who went to market with a cow and a hen for sale, and asked only five shillings for the cow, but ten pounds for the hen.  But no such fool was the Arab who lost his camel, and, after a long and fruitless search, anathematised the errant quadruped and her father and her mother, and swore by the Prophet that, should he find her, he would sell her for a dirham (sixpence).  At length his search was successful, and he at once regretted his oath; but such an oath must not be violated, so he tied a cat round the camel’s neck, and went about proclaiming:  “I will sell this camel for a dirham, and this cat for a hundred dinars (fifty pounds); but I will not sell one without the other.”  A man who passed by and heard this exclaimed:  “What a very desirable bargain that camel would be if she had not such a collar round her neck!"[31]

   [31] A variant of this occurs in the Heptameron, an
        uncompleted work in imitation of the Decameron,
        ascribed to Marguerite, queen of Navarre (16th century),
        but her valet de chambre Bonaventure des Periers is
        supposed to have had a hand in its composition.  In Novel
        55 it is related that a merchant in Saragossa on his
        death-bed desired his wife to sell a fine Spanish horse
        for as much as it would fetch and give the money to the
        mendicant friars.  After his death his widow did not
        approve of such a legacy, but, in order to obey her late
        husband’s will, she instructed a servant to go to the
        market and offer the horse for a ducat and her cat for
        ninety-nine ducats, both, however, to be sold together. 
        A gentleman purchased the horse and the cat, well
        knowing that the former was fully worth a hundred
        ducats, and the widow handed over one ducat—­for which
        the horse was nominally sold—­to the mendicant friars.

For readiness of wit the Arabs would seem to compare very favourably with any race, European or Asiatic, and many examples of their felicitous repartees are furnished by native historians and grammarians.  One of the best is:  When a khalif was addressing the people in a mosque on his accession to the khalifate, and told them, among other things in his own praise, that the plague which had so long raged in Baghdad had ceased immediately he became khalif; an old fellow present shouted:  “Of a truth, Allah was too merciful to give us both thee and the plague at the same time.”