On the particular day in question he has little luck until the fourth attempt when he finds a brass jar in his net. The stories are indeed delightful, but how innocent are they? A fisherman, desperate to make a living, casts his net out four times a day. As well he might!’ The innocent childhood delight in reading The Arabian Nights (or more correctly The Thousand and One Nights) has been much celebrated in Victorian and subsequent literature. But instead of ordering the book away, he said he envied me. I was well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came up behind me. In an essay on toy theatres, ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson recalled the evening when as a child ‘I brought back with me “The Arabian Nights Entertainments” in a fat, old double-columned volume with prints.
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