Note 243 — PERSIAN STORIES.

There is an omission in this tale which leaves it practically pointless, since it is not apparent how the lady’s words, “I remember,” should have sent her husband away without his having opened the chest. Much the same tale occurs in Mr. Gibb’s translation of the Turkish story-book, Qirq vezír taríkhí (“History of the Forty Vazírs,” p. 401), in which a man and his wife are playing the game yad est, or “I remember”—a game that may continue for days, and even weeks, the conditions being that neither must accept of anything from the other without saying, “I remember”; should one of them do so, the other on repeating these words becomes entitled to a forfeit. In the Turkish story, as, quite obviously, in the foregoing, the husband has taken a yad est with his wife, and is led by the latter to believe that she had made these preparations as for a feast, and trumped up the story about having concealed her lover in the chest, in order to take him by surprise when she should give him the key, and by his omitting to say “I remember” she should win the forfeit.