“Now these darwishes,” says the tale, “were the Khalifeh Harun Er-Rashid, and the Wezir Ja’far El-Barmeki, and Abu-Nuwas El-Hasan, the son of Hani, and Mesrur the Executioner.” Then there is that page where Nimeh and the Persian sage open a shop in Damascus, and stock it with costly things, and the sage sits with the astrolabe before him, “in the apparel of sages and physicians”--to wait for Nimeh’s lover, or some one who has news of her, to appear. Of a more subtly appealing charm is a sentence in the story of “Ala-ed-din,” where a man tells the father of one who is supposed to have been executed that another was actually slain in his stead, “for I ransomed him, by substituting another, from among such as deserved to be put to death.” A good book might be made of the stories of such poor unknown men in famous books as this prisoner who was of those that deserved to die. Lofty, strange, and infinite in its suggestiveness is the tale of Kamar-ez-Zeman and the Princess Budur. Two demons, an Efrit and an Efritch, contend as to the superiority in beauty of a youth and a girl whom they watch asleep in widely remote parts of the earth; and they carry them through the midnight sky and lay the two side by side to judge. On the morrow, the youth longs for the girl and the girl for the youth. Of their dreams, the King, the father of the youth, says: “Probably it was a confused dream that thou sawest in sleep,” and the father of the girl chains her up as mad. But in the end, after many wanderings and impediments, they transcend the separation of space and are married. Noblest of all, perhaps, is one of the short “Anecdotes” about the discovery of a terrestrial paradise.