having had a tooth drawn, produced the
following verses, either at the time, for the delectation of the
dentist, or afterwards, when seated among his friends: _I had a
companion of whom I was never tired, who suffered in my service, and
laboured with assiduity; whilst we were together I never saw him; and
when he appeared before my eyes, we had parted for ever._

This is how Osama wrote when the house of a miser was burnt down: _See
how the progress of time constrains us to acknowledge that there is a
destiny. Ibn Talib never lit a fire in his house, through avarice, yet
by fire it was destroyed._

"One thing," says Ibn Khallikan, in the notice of this satirist, "brings
on another." He then proceeds: "Abu 'l-Hasan Yahya Abd Al-Azim Al-Misri,
surnamed Al-Jazzar, recited to me the following verses which he had
composed on another literary man at Cairo, far advanced in age, who,
being attacked by a cutaneous eruption, anointed himself with sulphur:
_O, learned master, hearken to the demand of a friend devoid of sarcasm:
thou art old, and of course art near to the fire of hell; why then
anoint thyself with sulphur?_"

As a further quite unnecessary proof of the antiquity of jests which we
think new, I might append to this excellent sarcasm by a friend devoid
of sarcasm the story, often now told, of the rival chemists in a
provincial town, one of whom was old-fashioned and costly, and the other
new and cheap. To the costly one, who had asked too much for sulphur, a
customer remarked that if he went to the new shop opposite he could get
it for fourpence; which brought from the old-fashioned chemist, weary of
this competition, the admirable retort that if he went still farther, to
a certain place, he would get it for nothing.

East and West join hands again. When I was a boy living in a town by the
sea, one of my heroes in real life--whom I never knew, but admired
fearfully from a distance--was a famous stockbroker, whose splendid name
I could give if I chose. One of his many mansions was here, and I used
to see him often as he managed the finest pair of horses on the south
coast, which he drove in a phaeton with red wheels, always smoking a
cigar as he did so. Many were the stories told of his princely Victor
Radnor-ish ways, one of which credited him with a private compartment on
the train, into which his guests walked without a ticket--a magnificent
idea!--and another stated that he bought his trousers a hundred pairs
a