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an it please the Creator, we will do our business. To-morrow I will come to you and take Alaeddin, that I may show him the gardens and pleasaunces without the city,—it may be he hath not yet seen them,—and he shall see the merchant-folk and the notables a-pleasuring there, so he may become acquainted with them and they with him.”[1]
The[2] Maugrabin lay the night in his lodging; and on the morrow he came to the tailor’s house and knocked at the door. Alaeddin—of the excess of his joy in the clothes he had donned and of the pleasures he had enjoyed on the past day, what with the bath and eating and drinking and viewing the folk and the thought that his uncle was coming in the morning to take him and show him the gardens—slept not that night neither closed an eye and thought the day would never break.[3] So, when he heard a knocking at the door, he went out at once in haste, like a spark of fire, and opening, found his
- ↑ Likai yetearrefa fihim wa yetearrefou fihi. This passage confirms my reading of a former one; see ante, p. 68, note 3.
- ↑ Nighs DXXII.
- ↑ Lit. “believed not what time (ayyumetn) the day broke;” but ayyumeta (of which ayyumetn is a vulgar corruption) supposes the future and should be used with the aorist. The phrase, as I have translated common in the Nights.
