city.  When the Shah returned from Europe, he was moved by what he had seen there to build a small theatre; the theatre was built, but nothing is ever done with it.  The Teheran Bulbuls applied for its use to give their entertainment in, and the Shah was pleased to grant their request.  The mollahs raised objections; they said it would have a tendency to corrupt the morals of the Persians.  Once, twice, the entertainment was postponed; but the Shah finally overruled the bigoted priests’ objections, and “Uncle Ebenezer’s Visit to New York” was played twice in Nasr-e-Deen’s little gilded theatre a few days after I left, with great success; the first night, before the Shah and his nobles and the foreign ambassadors, and the second night before more common folk.  The two postponements and my early departure prevented me from being on hand as prompter.  The winter before, these dusky-faced “bul-buls” had performed before a Teheran audience, and one who was a member at that time tells an amusing story of the individual who acted as prompter on that occasion.  One of the performers appeared on the stage sufficiently charged with stage-fright to cause him to entirely forget his piece.  Expecting every moment to get the cue from the prompter’s box, what was his horror to hear, after waiting what probably seemed to him about an hour, instead of the cue, in a hoarse whisper that could be distinctly heard all over the room, the comforting remark, “I say, Charlie, I’ve lost the blooming place!”

The American missionaries have a small chapel in Teheran, and on Sunday morning we sometimes used to go; the little congregation gathered there was composed of strange elements collected together from far-off places.  From Colonel F ______, the grizzled military adventurer, now in the Shah’s service, and who was also with Maximilian in Mexico, to the young American lady who is said to have turned missionary and come, broken-hearted, to the distant East because her lover had died a few days before they were to be married, they are an audience of people each with a more or less adventurous history.  It is perfectly natural that it should be so; it is the irrepressible spirit of adventure that is either directly or indirectly responsible for their presence here.

Half an hour after the echoes of the three cheers and the “tiger” have died away finds me wet-footed and engaged in fording a series of aggravating little streams, that obstruct my path so frequently that to stop and shed one’s foot-gear for each soon becomes an intolerable nuisance.  I should think I can lay claim, without exaggeration, to crossing fifty of these streams inside of ten miles.  A good-sized stream emerges from the Elburz foot-hills; after reaching the plain it follows no regular channel, but spreads out like an open fan into a gradually widening area of small streams, that play their part in irrigating a few scattering fields and gardens, and are then lost in the sands of the desert to the