I

ceptional case, since such duties are too ignoble for man. Here again a blueglazed bowl comes into use, being held between the knees of the operator. might add that for the complete success of the operation it is considered necessary for the calf to be tied in sight of the cow. Otherwise the sacred fount infallibly goes dry. We had the greatest trouble to induce our underlings even to try the experiment of milking when no calf was in sight. That, I suppose, is why the Persians are so unwilling to sell or to kill a calf, and why they are so tender of the little creatures. The first time the stork visited our stable, a small animal wrapped up against the cold in green felt was brought blinking into the dining-room for us to admire. And we learned that the calf spent its first night with the servants in their quarters.

These, I hasten to add, are not in the house. While there are, especially in Persia, very solid advantages in having servants out of the house at night, there are also disadvantages, as will appear most plainly on a winter morning after a party. We then have the choice. of walking a long way through the snow to bang on the stable door or of waiting for breakfast. Their own breakfast, and all their other meals, the servants are supposed to provide for themselves, primarily because a firengi is an impure being, whose food and dishes are defilement to those of the faith, and secondarily because a firengi eats meats too strange for the palate of a Persian.

We have reason to believe, however, that at least in our house the Persians are not too fastidious about our purity or our menu. They have quarters at one

end of the stable, with a fireplace of their own, and rugs to cover the mud floor. That is why there are so many rugs in Persia-the mud floors. And there is another good reason why so many rugs are a little more or a little less than six feet long. A do-zar (two yards) is all that your Persian needs in the way of a bed, and if you have such a rug that is not brand-new, you may be sure that some very picturesque-looking customer has dreamed upon it the dreams of Asia. I fear that the dreams of our dependents are sometimes interrupted, for the roof over their heads is a mud one, and being new, it is leaky. After a rain or a thaw, therefore, we hire the youth of the neighborhood to play tag on it in order to pack the mud the harder with their bare feet.

The sahib-to my unpractised ear that classic word sounds more like sah'b-complains that he never knows how many servants we have. One of his diversions is to ask the khanum how many more she has taken on. Persia follows the rest of Asia in this regard, though as a matter of fact we are not so dreadfully attended as most of our neighbors. Servants work for longer hours with fewer outings than in America, but each one does much less. The only one of ours who makes us feel that he earns every shahi of his somewhat sketchy stipend is a youngster whose voice just begins to crack, a laborious, quick-witted, and picturesque infant named Abbas, after the uncle of the prophet. None of them is much more than a boy, for that matter. It surprises me to see how quickly they pick up our ways, which to them must seem capricious and inexplicable beyond reason. I often wish I knew what their comments are. We sometimes catch rumors, however, through confidences made to the masters of other servants. When we go out to dinner our cook, our butler, or both, usually go, too, to help in the kitchen or the dining-room. In fact, it is not good form for a person of

such consequence as a firengi to leave his door at all without a servant or two at his heels, though I have to confess that we

rather scandalize Hamadan by our unreadiness to conform to usage in this regard. But the servants of the firengis, at any rate, form a society apart, and you may be sure that among them no news is allowed to escape. Thus it has come

to our ears that the sah'b is known to an inner few as the Head of the Desert, because our house stands by itself outside the town. And I have lived to learn that I, having come to Persia without wives, children, valets, employments, or other visible human ties, am decorated with the picturesque title of Prince All Alone.

What to an alien eye is most striking about these gentry is their dress. To be served at dinner by a butler in bare or stockinged feet, according to the season, bearing upon his head a pontifical-looking miter of black or brown felt, not unlike the tall, brimless hat of Greek monks and Russian priests, is an experience which I shall never live long enough in Persia to take as a matter of course. It makes no difference that I myself am perfectly capable of balancing upon my brow an even more fantastic erection, eaved like a house, shinier than satin, and garnished with a coquettish ribbon. What catches my eye is the extraordinary fact that any human. being can cherish a head-dress different from my own, and account himself dis

graced ever to be seen without it. Tall hats, however, are not all that distinguish our serving-men. Between their kola and their unshod feet flap trousers not so full as those of the country Turk, but giving no hint of the leg it contains, and a succession of tailed or kilted coats. Persians think that firengi men dress as indecently as firengi women in permitting our clothes to follow closely the lines of our bodies. The fit of their own coats stops at the waist. From there hangs to the knee, or below, an amply pleated skirt which even a traveled Persian unwillingly exchanges for a Prince Albert, while a morning or evening coat is to him a thing of shame. Under his outer garment, with which he usually dispenses indoors, he wears a shorter and thinner one, less amply kilted, the tight sleeves of which are slit to

the elbow, and dangle decoratively, if inconveniently enough, when not buttoned up or turned back. This tunic is also more gaily hued.

The chief virtue of Habib, our butler, is that he possesses a beautiful emerald undercoat in which, when there is no company, he is sometimes good enough to pass, and eke to break, our plates. He is the official chief of our establishment, being technically known as the head of the service. He always receives an order with the words, "On my eye!" and when he knows not how to answer you he will say,

"What petition shall I make?" He is a youth of twenty or thereabouts, married to a young person of twelve or thirteen who stays with his mother. The society of neither of these ladies seems to interest him too intensely. He prefers to live in the stable with the other boys and the calf; he also loves to harden the mouth of the sah'b's horse; and when the time comes to work in the garden is he most in his element. We finally had to hide from him a pruning-knife we had obtained from abroad, so vastly did he prefer that toy to a dish-rag or a duster. I can't say that I blame him. He is much slower and stupider than is common in his quick witted race; but it takes a great deal to ruffle his temper, and the later we keep him up at night the better pleased he seems to be. He it was who during a period of interregnum spread the table for the sah'b's first bachelor dinner-party with one of the khanum's sheets, and not one of the best. Later in the evening, when supplementary refreshments were served, I noticed that Habib had covered a tray with one of the discarded napkins of the dinner-table. It was not really dirty, he afterward explained, and it seemed a pity. to risk spoiling a new lace doily! I discovered, though, that he was an excellent hand at decorating a dinner-table. Without any orders he once picked a lot of hyacinths to pieces and traced with the single flowers so pretty a pattern on the table-cloth that

I had n't the heart to affront him by changing it, though it was a little more feminine than I would have chosen for bachelors' hall. So does the genius of his race for design come out even in his humble fingers. On the whole I have learned more from him than he from me; as when he will politely take the store-room key in both hands, or ceremoniously call one aside in consultation, saying, "Without trouble, bring your honor here," or on state occasions serve tea on his knees. And he has given us strange glimpses of the world he lives in by speaking darkly of jinn in connection with some one's illness, and by telling us, when a lost watch was found in the house, that he had burned candles for its recovery.

The true head of the service is Mehmet Ali, the cook. Mehmet Ali was brought up as a butler, and an excellent one he is, though afflicted with a slight disfigure

ment of the mouth and a stammering of the tongue. But a domestic crisis drove him into the kitchen, where he quickly learned to make pancakes and cakes much more complicated as well as he did sauces and curries for pilau. which really sounds more like pileu, if you will pronounce it in the Ital

ian way. Consequently there are times when we are moved to call Mehmet Ali out of his kitchen and to say to him, with due ceremony, "Mehmet Ali, may your hand feel no pain." A

THE CARAVAN

With my own eyes I saw in the desert That the deliberate man outstripped him who had hurried on.

The wind-footed steed is broken down in

his course,

While the camel-driver jogs on with his beast to the end of the journey.

ON

-SADI: "The Flower-Garden."

NE of my study windows, catching all the sun of the south, faces a narrow, tilted country of gardens, darkly walled by a semicircle of mountains. One of bedroom windows gives me my glimpse of sparser gardens and the claycolored town and the plain that dips and rises delicately against the north. But both rooms look east, into the desert.

It is the kind of desert that the Persians call biaban, not the vaster and more desolate lut. Beyond our own, however, no garden wall ventures into it. Neither house nor poplar breaks the simplicity of its flowing lines. The empty land droops away toward the left, intercepted only by the Musalla, that barren bluff which archæologists like to fancy the site of seven-walled Ecbatana. Not quite opposite my windows a smaller hill,

a

bare and pointed like a cone, pricks the horizon. Beyond it lies an invisible hollow, the farther edge of which marks the limit of my visible world.

Of the sights to be seen from the four sides of our house this view offers least. Yet because it is mine I like it, and because it is so open and solitary, and because the faithful Persian sun rarely disappoints me there of his morning miracle, and because at night stars hang there of a brilliancy I have never seen, and so low that I can watch them from my bed. And I am new enough from the West never to forget that those windows look into Asia. Beyond that uneven rim of the east lies Kum. Beyond Kum is the lut, that great desert which has small reason to be less renowned than Gobi and the Sahara. Beyond the lut are Afghanistan, and Kashmir, and Tibet.

In the morning the sun looks strange to me, because he is fresh from Tibet and Kashmir and Afghanistan. At night the stars make me wonder what other watchers see them-what riders of camels, what prowlers of the dark, what sitters by red embers. How many times have I made in imagination that journey eastward from my window, across