all that he had overheard and how he had sold her the sugar for one of her anklets, saying, “This be poison.”  Then he charged him that, as soon as both of them should have swallowed the mess of milk and rice and clarified butter, they fall down and feign dead.  So master and servant agreed upon this plan.  And when the Fellah entered the hut she served to them the platter which contained their supper, and they ate the whole thereof, she sitting by intent upon their action and expecting their death.  But they served her with a sleight; for suddenly the Fellah changed countenance and made as though he waxed ill and faint, and fell upon the ground like one in the last agony, and shortly after the boy rolled upon the floor on similar wise.  Whenas she considered them she exclaimed, “May Allah have no mercy upon you; the wretches are dead!” Hereupon she went out and called aloud to her lover, and as he was coming cried, “Hie thee hither and enjoy the sight of these dead ones;” so he hastened up to them, and seeing them stretched upon the door said, “They’re dead.”  Presently quoth she, “We two, I and thou, will now make merry;” and so saying she withdrew with him into another hut, intending at once to sleep together.  Hereupon the husband arose and went in to them and smote the lover with a quarter-staff upon the neck and broke in his back bone,[FN#478] after which he turned to the wicked woman his wife and struck her and split open her head, and left the twain stone dead.  And as soon as it was midnight he wrapped them in a single sheet and carried them forth outside the village, and after choosing a place,[FN#479] dug a hole and thrust them therein.  And ever after that same Fellah had rest from his wife, and he bound himself by a strong oath not to interwed with womankind-never no more.[FN#480] And now (quoth Shahrazad) I will recount to you another tale touching the wiles of women; and thereupon she fell to relating the adventure of

The woman who humoured her lover at
her husband’s expense.[FN#481]

There was a man in Cairo and he had a wife who ever boasted of her gentle blood and her obedience and her docility and her fear of the Lord.  Now she happened to have in the house a pair of fatted ganders[FN#482] and she also had a lover whom she kept in the background.  Presently the man came to visit her and seeing beside her the plump birds felt his appetite sharpened by them, so he said to her, “O Such-an-one, needs must thou let cook these two geese with the best of stuffing so that we may make merry over them, for that my mind is bent upon eating goose flesh.”  Quoth she, “’Tis right easy; and by thy life, O So-and-so, I will slaughter them and stuff them and thou shalt take them and carry them home with thee and eat them, nor shall this pimp my husband taste of them or even smell them.”  “How wilt thou do?” asked he, and she answered, “I will serve him a sleight shall enter into his brains