"Why," said Abu Dolad, "your poem commencing thus: _Now let misfortune do its worst, and time inflict its evils! There is no excuse for eyes which have not shed their tears._ I wish, by Allah! that this elegy had been composed by you on me." "Nay!" said the poet, "may I and my family die to save the Emir, and may I leave the world before you!" To this Abu Dolad replied: "He whose death is deplored in verses like those is immortal." Surely the palmy days of poetry have passed away. How one would like to think of Mr. Kipling, say, being summoned to Buckingham Palace to speak a piece and retiring with a cheque for L1025, which is what fifty thousand dirhems come to. Gratitude, even when it is excessive, is always a good theme. In the following case the proportions were respected with more fitness. Al-Wazir Al-Muhallabi was both vizier and poet. He was also a very poor vegetarian, and once, on a journey, being unable to obtain flesh-food, he recited extempore these verses: _Where is death sold, that I may buy it? for this life is devoid of good. Oh! let death, whose taste to me is sweet, come and free me from a detested life! When I see a tomb from afar, I wish to be its inhabitant. May the Being who granteth tranquillity have compassion on the soul of the generous man who will bestow death, as a charity, upon one of his brethren!_ These verses being heard by a person who was travelling in the same caravan with him, and whose name was Abd Allah As-Sufi (or, by another account, Abu 'l-Hasan Al-Askalani), he bought for Al-Muhallabi a dirhem's worth of meat, cooked it, and gave it to him to eat. "They then," says Ibn, "separated, and Al-Muhallabi having experienced a change of fortune, became vizier to Moizz Ad-Dawlat at Baghdad, while the person who had travelled with him and purchased the meat for him was reduced to poverty. Having then learned that Al-Muhallabi was a vizier, he set out to find him and wrote to him these lines: _Repeat to the vizier, for whose life I would sacrifice my own--repeat to him the words of one who reminds him of what he has forgotten. Do you remember when, in a life of misery, you said: 'Where is death sold, that I may buy it?'_ The vizier on reading the note recollected the circumstance, and, moved with the joy of doing a generous action, he ordered seven hundred dirhems to be given to the writer, and inscribed these words on the paper: _The similitude of those who lay out their substance in the service of God is as a grain of corn which has produced seven ears and in every ear a hundred grains; for God giveth many-fold to whom He pleaseth._ He then prayed God's blessing on him, and clothed him in a robe of honour, and appointed him to a place under government, so that"--the corollary seems hardly worth adding--"he might live in easy circumstances."