and throwing them into a pit, trod them with our feet, till the pit became a great water-pool.  Then we waited awhile and presently returning thither, found that the sun had wroughten on the grape-juice and it was become wine.  So we used to drink it till we were drunken and our faces flushed and we fell to singing and dancing and running about in the merriment of drunkenness;[FN#437] whereupon our masters said to us, ’What is it that reddeneth your faces and maketh you dance and sing?’ We replied, ’Ask us not, what is your quest in questioning us hereof?’ But they insisted, saying, ’You must tell us so that we may know the truth of the case,’ till we told them how we had pressed grapes and made wine.  Quoth they, ‘Give us to drink thereof’; but quoth we, ‘The grapes are spent.’  So they brought us to a Wady, whose length we knew not from its breadth nor its beginning from its end wherein were vines each bunch of grapes on them weighing twenty pounds[FN#438] by the scale and all within easy reach, and they said, ‘Gather of these.’  So we gathered a mighty great store of grapes and finding there a big trench bigger than the great tank in the King’s garden we filled it full of fruit.  This we trod with our feet and did with the juice as before till it became strong wine, which it did after a month; whereupon we said to them, ’’Tis come to perfection; but in what will ye drink it?’ And they replied, ’We had asses like unto you; but we ate them and kept their heads:  so give us to drink in their skulls.’  We went to their caves which we found full of heads and bones of the Sons of Adam, and we gave them to drink, when they became drunken and lay down, nigh two hundred of them.  Then we said to one another, ’Is it not enough that they should ride us, but they must eat us also?  There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great!  But we will ply them with wine, till they are overcome by drunkenness, when we will slay them and be at rest from them.’  Accordingly, we awoke them and fell to filling the skulls and gave them to drink, but they said, ‘This is bitter.’  We replied, ’Why say ye ’tis bitter?  Whoso saith thus, except he drink of it ten times, he dieth the same day.’  When they heard this, they feared death and cried to us, ‘Give us to drink the whole ten times.’  So we gave them to drink, and when they swallowed the rest of the ten draughts they waxed drunken exceedingly and their strength failed them and they availed not to mount us.  Thereupon we dragged them together by their hands and laying them one upon another, collected great plenty of dry vine-stalks and branches and heaped it about and upon them:  then we set fire to the pile and stood afar off, to see what became of them.”—­And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.

   When it was the Seven Hundred and Seventy-second Night,