Rise, O comrade of cup, and to joy incline; ✿ I’ve no patience, O brother, from pressing of wine: See’st not how night with her hosts be fled ✿ Routed, and morn doth her troops align? How with Nadd and ambergris, rarest scents, ✿ Rose laughs and smiles on us Eglantine? This, my lord, is joy, this is pure delight, ✿ Not standing at doors which the books confine.”
But when my mother, O Commander of the Faithful, espied these doings she reproached me, yet would I not be reproved. Then she saw that my wealth would be wasted, so she divided it between me and her, to each one half, a moiety for herself and her daughter, and the rest for myself. And presently she left me carrying away her good and separated herself from me, abiding afar and leaving me to enjoy my frivolity and intoxication. I ceased not eating and drinking and diversion and disport, and enjoying the all-conquering faces of the beautiful,[125] until the days smote me with their shafts, and all my wealth fell away from me and naught remained to me either above me or below me, and I ceased to be master of aught. Then my condition waxed strait, and as nothing was left to me at home I sold the pots and pans until I lacked even a sleeping-mat, and I used to patch my skirt with my sleeve. And naught profited me, neither friend nor familiar nor lover, nor remained there any one of them to feed me with a loaf of bread; so my case became hard and the folk entreated me evilly, nor was there one of my comrades or compeers who would take thought for me; nay more, when I met any of them on the road or at the receptions they would turn away their faces from me. So at last I took to pulling up the slabs[126] of the house floor and selling them by way of a livelihood, and one day as I did on this wise, lo and behold! there opened in the floor a large vault whereinto I descended.——And Shahrazad was surprised by the dawn of day, and fell silent and ceased to say her permitted say. Then quoth her sister Dunyazad, “How sweet is thy story, O sister mine, and how enjoyable and delectable.” Quoth she, “And where is this compared with that I would relate to you on the coming night an the King suffer me to survive?” Now when it was the next night, and that was