PREFACE
Here is a collection of excellent tales. They are now old friends of mine, yet I made their acquaintance by mere chance. I fell upon them—or rather I should say upon some of them—a few years ago, when I was first attempting to gain that smattering of Persian which, slight though it be, has given me so much pleasure. It was on a secondhand bookstall—the very bookstall, I believe, that has been made famous by Mr. Andrew Lang in his 'Book Lover's Purgatory'—that I, rummaging, discovered some little French volumes, French volumes of the last century, lettered 'Mille et un Jours.' The title captivated me at once. I had loved 'The Thousand and One Nights' all my life, but I had never heard of 'The Thousand and One Days.' I opened one of the volumes, and found that they professed to contain Persian stories. To the beginner in Persian, anything bearing the
