He said: I heard Muḥammad ibn Khidāsh say: I heard Aḥmad ibn Ḥafṣ say: I entered upon Abū al-Ḥasan—meaning Ismāʿīl, the father of Abū ʿAbd Allāh—at the moment of his death. He said, “To the best of my knowledge, not a single dirham of my wealth comes from anything unlawful, nor a single dirham from anything doubtful.”
Aḥmad added, “When I heard that, I felt utterly small in my own eyes.”
Then Abū ʿAbd Allāh said, “A man is never more truthful than he is at the time of death.”
He also said: Abū ʿAbd Allāh once rented a house and stayed in it for a long while. I heard him say, “During my whole stay in that house I never wiped my private part on its wall or on the ground.”
He was asked, “Why not?” He replied, “Because the house belongs to someone else.”
He continued: One day in Farabr Abū ʿAbd Allāh said to me, “I have heard that a slave-dealer has arrived with slave-girls. Will you go with me?”
I answered, “Yes,” so we went to him and he brought out some very beautiful, fair-skinned girls.
Then, from among them, a plump, unattractive Khazar girl appeared. He looked at her, touched her chin, and said, “Buy this one for us.”
I said, “She is ugly and unseemly; she will not do. For the price of this one we could buy any of those we just saw.”
He replied, “Buy this one, for I have already touched her chin, and I dislike touching a slave-girl and then not purchasing her.”
So he bought her—according to those who knew—for the high price of five hundred dirhams.
She remained with him until he took her with him to Nīshāpūr.
Ghunjar said: Abū ʿAmr Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Muqriʾ narrated to us: I heard Bakr ibn Munīr—Muḥammad ibn Abī Ḥātim reported the substance of it, but the wording is that of Bakr—say: A shipment of goods that his son Aḥmad had sent to him was brought to al-Bukhārī, and a group of merchants gathered around him.
They offered to buy it from him with a profit of five thousand dirhams.
He said, “Come back tonight.”
The next day other merchants came to him and requested the goods with a profit of ten thousand dirhams. He said, “I…"