Note 240 — PERSIAN STORIES.

We have also seen in the story of Sháh Manssur, p. 18, how the unchaste woman made her husband believe that he was mad.—The Kází ascribes his imaginary ailment to over-eating, but also, as I understand it, to the fact that the food of which he partook too freely had been baked in hog’s blood. Swine’s flesh is an abomination to the Muslim as to the Jew, though the law allows the former to eat any kind of food if he be pressed by hunger and nothing else can be procured. Possibly the worthy Kází at the time he was in the house of the deceased Kávas the Armenian—where hog’s flesh and hog’s blood might well be found—thought that his condition, as to appetite, justified his eating of the “funeral baked meats,” though partly composed of the unclean animal.