Everybody knows the story of the silly old woman who went to market with a cow and a hen for sale, and asked only five shillings for the cow, but ten pounds for the hen. But no such fool was the Arab who lost his camel, and, after a long and fruitless search, anathematised the errant quadruped and her father and her mother, and swore by the Prophet that, should he find her, he would sell her for a dirham (sixpence). At length his search was successful, and he at once regretted his oath; but such an oath must not be violated, so he tied a cat round the camel's neck, and went about proclaiming: "I will sell this camel for a dirham, and this cat for a hundred dinars (fifty pounds); but I will not sell one without the other." A man who passed by and heard this exclaimed: "What a very desirable bargain that camel would be if she had not such a _collar_ round her neck!"[31] [31] A variant of this occurs in the _Heptameron_, an uncompleted work in imitation of the _Decameron_, ascribed to Marguerite, queen of Navarre (16th century), but her _valet de chambre_ Bonaventure des Periers is supposed to have had a hand in its composition. In Novel 55 it is related that a merchant in Saragossa on his death-bed desired his wife to sell a fine Spanish horse for as much as it would fetch and give the money to the mendicant friars. After his death his widow did not approve of such a legacy, but, in order to obey her late husband's will, she instructed a servant to go to the market and offer the horse for a ducat and her cat for ninety-nine ducats, both, however, to be sold together. A gentleman purchased the horse and the cat, well knowing that the former was fully worth a hundred ducats, and the widow handed over one ducat--for which the horse was nominally sold--to the mendicant friars. For readiness of wit the Arabs would seem to compare very favourably with any race, European or Asiatic, and many examples of their felicitous repartees are furnished by native historians and grammarians. One of the best is: When a khalif was addressing the people in a mosque on his accession to the khalifate, and told them, among other things in his own praise, that the plague which had so long raged in Baghdad had ceased immediately he became khalif; an old fellow present shouted: "Of a truth, Allah was too merciful to give us both _thee_ and the plague at the same time." * * * * * The story of the Unlucky Slippers in Cardonne's _Melanges de Litterature Orientale_ is a very good specimen of Arabian humour:[32]