go back to the dervish and demand his money once more, and should he refuse, threaten to complain to the kazi.  The result may be readily guessed:  no sooner did the merchant mention the kazi than the rascally dervish said, “My good friend, what need is there to complain to the kazi?  Here is your money; it was only a little joke on my part.”  But in the evening, when he went to receive the kazi’s pretended deposit, he experienced the truth of the saw, that “covetousness sews up the eyes of cunning.”

A variant of this found in the continental “Gesta Romanorum” (ch. cxviii. of Swan’s translation), in which a knight deposits ten talents with a respectable old man, who when called upon to refund the money denies all knowledge of it.  By the advice of an old woman the knight has ten chests made, and employs a person to take them to the old man and represent them as containing treasure; and while one of them is being carried into his house the knight enters and in the stranger’s presence demands his money, which is at once delivered to him.

In Mr. Edward Rehatsek’s translated selections from the Persian story-book “Shamsa u Kuhkuha” (see ante, p. 237), printed at Bombay in 1871, under the title of “Amusing Stories,” there is a tale (No. xviii.) which also bears some resemblance to that of the Melancholist and the Sharper; and as Mr. Rehatsek’s little work is exceedingly scarce, I give it in extenso as follows: 

There was in Damascus a man of the name of Zayn el-Arab, with the honey of whose life the poison of hardships was always mixed.  Day and night he hastened like the breeze from north to south in the world of exertion, and he was burning brightly like straw, from his endeavours in the oven of acquisition in order to gain a loaf of bread and feed his family.  In course of time, however, he succeeded in accumulating a considerable sum of money, but as he had tasted the bitter poison of destitution, and had for a very long time earned the heavy load of poverty upon his back, and fearing to lose his property by the chameleon-like changes of fortune, he took up his money on a certain night, carried it out of the city, and buried it under a tree.  After some time had passed be began sorely to miss the presence of his treasure, and betook himself to the tree to refresh his eyes with the sight of it.  But when he dug up the ground at the foot of the tree he discovered that his soul-exhilarating deposit was refreshing the palate of some one else.  The morning of his prosperity was suddenly changed into the evening of bitterness and disappointment.  He was perplexed to what friend to confide his secret, and to what remedy to fly for the recovery of his treasure.  The lancet of grief had pierced the liver of his peace, and the huntsman of distress had tied up the wings and feet of the bird of his serenity.  One day he went on some business to a learned and wise man of the city with whom he was on a footing of intimacy.  This man said to him, “It