his Majesty, merely with a view to encourage him in his laudable resolution to banish them, and to offer his aid in doing so should his Majesty manifest any wish to have it; and not to demand their punishment on the part of the British Government.  In the one case, if the King promised to punish the offenders and relented and forgave them, we could only regret his weakness; but in the other, if he promised to punish them and failed to do so, we should consider it due to the character of our Government to insist upon the fulfilment of his promise.  On the evening of the 11th I got the above report of his interview with the King from Captain Bird; and, on the 12th, I wrote to tell him, that I considered him to have acted very indiscreetly; that he had brought this vexation and mortification upon himself by his overweening confidence in his personal influence over the King; that he ought to have waited for instructions from me, or at least for a reply from me to his letter, regarding the former interview at Court; that I could not now give him the support he required, as I could neither demand that his requisitions should be complied with, nor tell the King that I approved of them that he had been authorized by me to act on his own discretion in any case of great emergency, but this could not be considered of such a character, for no evil or inconvenience was to be apprehended from a day or two’s delay, since the question really was, whether his Majesty should have a dozen fiddlers or only ten.

In the beginning of September 1850, the King became enamoured of one of his mother’s waiting-maids, and demanded her in marriage.  See was his mother’s favourite bedfellow, and she would not part with her.  The King became angry, and to soothe him his mother told him that it was purely out of regard for him and his children that she refused to part with this young woman; that she had a “sampun,” or the coiled figure of a snake in the hair on the back of her neck.  No man, will purchase a horse with such a mark, or believe that any family can be safe in which a horse or mare with such a mark is kept.  His mother told him, that if he cohabited with a woman having such a mark, he and all his children must perish.  The King said that he might probably have, among his many wives, some with marks of this kind; and that this might account for his frequent attacks of palpitation of the heart.  “No doubt,” said the old Queen Dowager; “we have long thought so; but your Majesty gets into such a towering passion when we venture to speak of your wives, that we have been afraid to give expression to our thoughts and fears.”  “Perhaps,” said the King, “I may owe to this the death, lately, of my poor son, the heir-apparent.”  “We have long thought so,” replied his mother.  The chief eunuch, Busheer, was forthwith ordered to inspect the back of the necks of all save that of the chief consort, the mother of the late and present heir-apparent.  He reported that he had found the