[21] This Assembly is well known to students. Harith is at Barka'id. The feast at the end of Ramadan is approaching, and being desirous of joining in this solemnity he goes to the public prayer in his best attire. When the congregation has formed itself into rows, after the manner of Moslem worship, he espies an old man with his eyes closed, accompanied by an old woman. The man takes out of a bag a number of papers curiously written or illuminated in variously colored inks; and the old woman, going through the rows, presents them to those whom she guesses from their appearance to be charitably disposed. One of them falls to the lot of Harith, who finds on it some strange verses full of alliterations and plays on words. He keeps it, and when the old woman, being disappointed in her appeal, returns to reclaim it, he offers her a dirhem on the condition that she will tell him the name of the author. She informs him that the old man had composed the verses, and that he was a native of Seruj. Harith then guesses that he must be Abu Zayd, and is much concerned to find that he has become blind. When the prayer is over he goes up to him and discovers that he is indeed Abu Zayd, whereupon he presents him with a garment and invites him to his house. No sooner are they in private than Abu Zayd opens his eyes, which are perfectly sound, and Harith discovers that his pretended blindness was a trick to excite pity. [22] This Assembly, like several others that will be met with in the course of the work, is so essentially Arabic as almost to forbid intelligible translation. Two suitors, an old man and a youth, appear before the Kadi of Ma'arrah. The former narrates to the Kadi that he had possessed a beautiful and attractive, yet obedient and active, slave girl; that the youth had borrowed her, treated her roughly, and then returned her in an infirm state. The youth admits the charge, but declares that he had offered sufficient compensation; and then complains that the old man detained as a pledge a male slave of his, who was of good origin and qualities, and highly serviceable to his master. The Kadi perceives from the style of these addresses that the language is enigmatical, and bids the litigants speak plainly. The youth then improvises some verses to explain that by a slave girl the old man meant a needle which the youth had borrowed, and the eye of which he had broken by accident as he was drawing the thread through it; the male slave which the old man detained was a pencil, or _stylus_, for the application of _kohl_, the dark pigment with which Orientals anoint the eyelid to heighten by contrast the luster of the eye. The old man in his turn admits the truth of this, but pleads in mournful verse his poverty and his inability to bear the loss even of a needle. The chief feature in the composition is the enigmatical description of the needle and pencil, which depends on the double meanings of the words and phrases contained in it. Some of these are so