crepit old
dotard, remained a fixture in his house, because of the dowry. He was
teased to death by her company; but, from the circumstance of the dower,
he had no remedy. In the meantime some of his friends having come to
comfort him, one of them asked: "How is it with you, since the loss of
that dear friend?" He answered: "The absence of my wife is not so
intolerable as the presence of her mother:--They plucked the rose, and
left me the thorn; they plundered the treasure, and let the snake
remain. To have our eye pierced with a spear were more tolerable than to
see the face of an enemy. It were better to break with a thousand
friends than to put up with one rival."
XV
In my youth I recollect I was passing through a street, and caught a
glimpse of a moon-like charmer during the dog-days, when their heat was
drying up the moisture of the mouth, and the samurn, or desert hot-wind,
melting the marrow of the bones. From the weakness of human nature I was
unable to withstand the darting rays of a noon-tide sun, and took
refuge under the shadow of a wall, hopeful that somebody would relieve
me from the oppressive heat of summer, and quench the fire of my thirst
with a draught of water. All at once I beheld a luminary in the shadowed
portico of a mansion, so splendid an object that the tongue of eloquence
falls short in summing up its loveliness; such as the day dawning upon a
dark night, or the fountain of immortality issuing from chaos. She held
in her hand a goblet of snow-cooled water, into which she dropped some
sugar, and tempered it with spirit of wine; but I know not whether she
scented it with attar, or sprinkled it with a few blossoms from her own
rosy cheek. In short, I received the beverage from her idol-fair hand;
and, having drunk it off, found myself restored to a new life. "_Such is
not my parching thirst that it is to be quenched with the limpid element
of water, were I to swallow it in oceans_:--Joy to that happy aspect
whose eye can every morning contemplate such a countenance as thine. A
person intoxicated with wine lies giddy and awake half the night; but if
intoxicated with the cup-bearer (God), the day of judgment must be his
dawn or morning."
XVI
In the year that Sultan Mohammed Khowarazm-Shah had for some political
reason chosen to make peace with the king of Khota, I entered the
metropolitan mosque at Kashghar, and met a youth incomparably lovely,
and exquisitely handsome; such as they h
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