poured forth a stream of the nectar of beauty, as the partridge cannot be satisfied with devouring the moonlight.”  In Book xii., chap. 100, a female ascetic shows a wandering prince the portrait of the Princess Mandaravati, “and Sundarasena when he beheld that maiden, who, though she was present there only in a picture, seemed to be of romantic beauty and like a flowing forth of joy, immediately felt as if he had been pierced with the arrows of the god of the flowery bow [i.e.  Kama].”  In chapter 35 of Scott’s translation of the “Bahar-i-Danish,” Prince Ferokh-Faul opens a volume, “which he had scarcely done when the fatal portrait of the fair princess who, the astrologers had foretold, was to occasion him so many perils, presented itself to his view.  He instantly fainted, when the slave, alarmed, conveyed intelligence of his condition to the sultan, and related the unhappy cause of the disorder.”  In Gomberville’s romances of Polexandre, the African prince, Abd-el-Malik, falls in love with the portrait of Alcidiana, and similar incidents occur in the romance of Agesilaus of Colchos and in the Story of the Seven Wazirs (vol. vi.); but why multiply instances?  Nothing is more common in Asiatic fictions.

    The fuller, his wife, and the trooper.—­Vol.  XI. p. 157.

In addition to the versions of this amusing story referred to on p. 157—­all of which will be found in the second volume of my work on “Popular Tales and Fictions,” pp. 212-228—­there is yet another in a Persian story-book, of unknown date, entitled, “Shamsa u Kuhkuha,” written by Mirza Berkhorder Turkman, of which an account, together with specimens, is given in a recently-published little book (Quaritch), “Persian Portraits, a sketch of Persian History, Literature, and Politics,” by Mr. F. F. Arbuthnot, author of “Early Ideas:  a Group of Hindoo Stories.”

This version occurs in a tale of three artful wives—­or, to employ the story-teller’s own graphic terms, “three whales of the sea of fraud and deceit:  three dragons of the nature of thunder and the quickness of lightning; three defamers of honour and reputation; namely, three men-deceiving, lascivious women, each of whom had from the chicanery of her cunning issued the diploma of turmoil to a hundred cities and countries, and in the arts of fraud they accounted Satan as an admiring spectator in the theatre of their stratagems.[FN#509] One of them was sitting in the court of justice of the kazi’s embrace; the second was the precious gem of the bazaar-master’s diadem of compliance; and the third was the beazle and ornament of the signet-ring of the life and soul of the superintendent of police.  They were constantly entrapping the fawns of the prairie of deceit within the grasp of cunning, and plundered the wares of the caravans of tranquillity of hearts of strangers and acquaintances, by means of the edge of the scimitar of fraud.  One day this trefoil of roguery met at the public bath, and,