When it was the Five Hundred and Ninety-sixth Night,

She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when the neighbours proposed to heap fuel about the cabinet and to burn it the Kazi bawled out to them, “Do it not!” And they said to one another, “Verily the Jinn make believe to be mortals and speak with men’s voices.”  Thereupon the Kazi repeated somewhat of the Sublime Koran and said to the neighbours, “Draw near to the cabinet wherein we are.”  So they drew near, and he said, “I am so and so the Kazi, and ye are such an one and such an one, and we are here a company.”  Quoth the neighbours, “Who brought you here?” And he told them the whole case from beginning to end.  Then they fetched a carpenter, who opened the five doors and let out Kazi, Wazir, Wali, King and carpenter in their queer disguises; and each, when he saw how the others were accoutred, fell a-laughing at them.  Now she had taken away all their clothes; so every one of them sent to his people for fresh clothes and put them on and went out, covering himself therewith from the sight of the folk.  “Consider, therefore, O our lord the King” (said the Wazir), “what a trick this woman played off upon the folk!  And I have heard tell also a tale of

The Three Wishes,[FN#215] or the Man who Longed to see the Night of Power.

A certain man had longed all his life to look upon the Night of Power,[FN#216] and one night it befel that he gazed at the sky and saw the angels, and Heaven’s gates thrown open; and he beheld all things prostrating themselves before their Lord, each in its several stead.  So he said to his wife, “Harkye, such an one, verily Allah hath shown me the Night of Power, and it hath been proclaimed to me, from the invisible world, that three prayers will be granted unto me; so I consult thee for counsel as to what shall I ask.”  Quoth she, “O man, the perfection of man and his delight is in his prickle; therefore do thou pray Allah to greaten thy yard and magnify it.”  So he lifted up his hands to heaven and said, “O Allah, greaten my yard and magnify it.”  Hardly had he spoken when his tool became as big as a column and he could neither sit nor stand nor move about nor even stir from his stead; and when he would have carnally known his wife, she fled before him from place to place.  So he said to her, “O accursed woman, what is to be done?  This is thy list, by reason of thy lust.”  She replied, “No, by Allah, I did not ask for this length and huge bulk, for which the gate of a street were too strait.  Pray Heaven to make it less.”  So he raised his eyes to Heaven and said, “O Allah, rid me of this thing and deliver me therefrom.”  And immediately his prickle disappeared altogether and he became clean smooth.  When his wife saw this, she said, “I have no occasion for thee, now thou are become pegless as a eunuch, shaven and shorn;” and he answered her, saying, “All this comes of thine ill-omened counsel and thine imbecile judgment.  I had three