the price he pretends to want for them.  From this we know that the tigers could be bought very cheap, and since Mazanderan tigers are very rare in European menageries, we determine to go and look at them anyway.  They are found to be the merest kittens, not yet old enough to see.  They are savage little brutes, and spend their whole time in dashing recklessly against the bars of the coop in which they are confined.  They refuse to eat or drink, and although the Persians declare that they would soon learn to feed, we conclude that they would be altogether too much trouble, even if it were possible to keep them from dying of starvation.

On the evening of June 3d we put off, together with a number of native passengers, in a lighter, for the vessel which is loading up with bales of cotton at the floating dock.  Most of the night is spent in sitting on deck and watching the Persian roustabouts carry the cargo aboard, for the shouting, the inevitable noisy squabbling, and the thud of bales dumped into the hold render sleep out of the question.

The steamer starts at sunrise, and the captain comes round to pay his respects.  He is more of a German than a Russian, and seems pleased to welcome aboard his ship the first English or American passengers he has had for years.  He makes himself agreeable, and takes a good deal of interest in explaining anything about the burning of petroleum residue on the Caspian steamers, instead of coal.  He takes us down below and shows us the furnaces, and explains the modus operandi.  We are delighted at the evident superiority of this fuel over coal, and the economy and ease of supplying the furnaces.  Seven copecks the forty pounds, the captain says, is the cost of the fuel, and two and a half roubles the expense of running the vessel at full speed an hour.  There is not an ounce of coal aboard, the boiler-house is as clean and neat as a parlor, and no cinders fall upon the deck or awnings.  In place of huge coal-bunkers, taking up half the vessel’s carrying space, compact tanks above the furnaces hold all the liquid fuel.  Pipes convey it automatically, much or little, as easily as regulating a water-tap, to the fire-boxes.  Jets of steam scatter it broadcast throughout the box in the form of spray, and insures its spontaneous combustion into flame.  A peep in these furnaces displays a mass of flame filling an iron box in which no fuel is to be seen.  A slight twist of a brass cock increases or diminishes this flame at once.  A couple of men in clean linen uniforms manage the whole business.  We both concluded that it was far superior to coal.

Many windings and tackings are necessary to get outside Ashdurada Bay; sometimes we are steaming bow on for Bunder Guz, apparently returning to port; at other times we are going due south, when our destination is nearly north.  This, the captain explains, is due to the intricacy of the channel, which is little more than a deeper stream, so to speak, meandering crookedly through the shallows and sand-bars of the bay.  Buoys and sirens mark the steamer’s course to the Russian naval station of Ashdurada.  Here we cross a bar so shallow that no vessel of more than twelve feet draught can enter or leave the bay.  Our own ship is a light-draught steamer of five hundred tons burden.