In this very city of Tus, Abul Kasim Mansur (or Ahmed) Firdusi was born, A.D. 935. One loves to think that perhaps he got his name from the Persian-Arabic word for garden; for, verily, it was he that gathered into one garden all the beautiful flowers which had blossomed in the fancy of his people. As he has draped the figures in his great epic, so has an admiring posterity draped his own person. His fortune has been interwoven with the fame of that Mahmud of Ghazna (998-1030), the first to bear the proud title of "Sultan," the first to carry Mohammed and the prophets into India. The Round Table of Mahmud cannot be altogether a figment of the imagination. With such poets as Farruchi, Unsuri, Minutsheri, with such scientists as Biruni and Avicenna as intimates, what wonder that Firdusi was lured by the splendors of a court life! But before he left his native place he must have finished his epic, at least in its rough form; for we know that in 999 he dedicated it to Ahmad ibn Muhammad of Chalandsha. He had been working at it steadily since 971, but had not yet rounded it out according to the standard which he had set for himself. Occupying the position almost of a court poet, he continued to work for Mahmud, and this son of a Turkish slave became a patron of letters. On February 25, 1010, his work was finished. As poet laureate, he had inserted many a verse in praise of his master. Yet the story goes, that though this master had covenanted for a gold dirhem a line, he sent Firdusi sixty thousand silver ones, which the poet spurned and distributed as largesses and hied him from so ungenerous a master. It is a pretty tale. Yet some great disappointment must have been his lot, for a lampoon which he wrote a short time afterwards is filled with the bitterest satire upon the prince whose praises he had sung so beautifully. Happily, the satire does not seem to have gotten under the eyes of Mahmud; it was bought off by a friend, for one thousand dirhems a verse. But Firdusi was a wanderer; we find him in Herat, in Taberistán, and then at the Buyide Court of Bagdad, where he composed his "Yusuf and Salikha," a poem as Mohammedan in spirit as the "Sháh Námeh" was Persian. In 1021, or 1025, he returned to Tus to die, and to be buried in his own garden--because his mind had not been orthodox enough that his body should rest in sacred ground. At the last moment--the story takes up again--Mahmud repented and sent the poet the coveted gold. The gold arrived at one gate while Firdusi's body was being carried by at another; and it was spent by his daughter in the building of a hospice near the city. For the sake of Mahmud let us try to believe the tale.