measure which made all hearts yearn to her; then she sang these lines, "O ye that can aid me, a wretched lover, * Whom longing burns nor can rest restore me! Though all you have done I have well deserved, * I take refuge with you, so exult not o'er me: True, I am weak and low and vile, * But I'll bear your will and whatso you bore me: My death at your hands what brings it of glory? * I fear but your sin which of life forlore me!" Quoth the Caliph, "By Allah, good! O Ja'afar, never in my life have I heard a voice so enchanting as this." "Then haply the Caliph's wrath hath passed away," said Ja'afar, and he replied, "Yes, 'tis gone." Thereupon they descended from the tree, and the Caliph said to Ja'afar, "I wish to go in and sit with them; and hear the damsel sing before me." "O Commander of the Faithful," replied Ja'afar, "if thou go in to them they will be terribly troubled, and Shaykh Ibrahim will assuredly die of fright." But the Caliph answered, "O Ja'afar, thou must teach me some device wherewith to delude them and whereby I can foregather with them without their knowing me." So they walked towards the Tigris pondering the matter, and presently came upon a fisherman who stood fishing under the pavilion windows. Now some time before this, the Caliph (being in the pavilion) had called to Shaykh Ibrahim and asked him, "What noise is this I hear under the windows?" and he had answered, "It is voices of fisher folk catching fish:" so quoth the Caliph, "Go down and forbid them this place;" and he forbade them accordingly. However that night a fisherman named Karim, happening to pass by and seeing the garden gate open, said to himself, "This is a time of negligence; and I will take advantage of it to do a bit of fishing." So he took his net and cast it, but he had hardly done so when behold, the Caliph come up single-handed and, standing hard by, knew him and called aloud to him, "Ho, Karim!" The fisherman, hearing himself named, turned round, and seeing the Caliph, trembled and his side-muscles quivered, as he cried, "By Allah, O Commander of the Faithful, I did it not in mockery of the mandate; but poverty and a large family drove me to what thou seest!" Quoth the Caliph, "Make a cast in my name." At this the fisherman was glad and going to the bank threw his net, then waiting till it had spread out at full stretch and settled down, hauled it up and found in it various kinds of fish. The Caliph was pleased and said, "O Karim, doff thy habit." So he put off a gaberdine of coarse woollen stuff patched in an hundred places whereon the lice were rampant, and a turband which had never been untwisted for three years but to which he had sewn every rag he came upon. The Caliph also pulled off his person two vests of Alexandrian and Ba'lbak silk, a loose inner robe and a long-sleeved outer coat, and said to the fisherman, "Take them; and put them on," while he assumed the foul gaberdine and filthy turband and drew a