of a native to the caravanserai, this quick-witted individual leads the way through tortuous alleyways to the other end of the village and pilots me to the camp of a tea caravan, pitched on the outskirts, thinking I had requested to be guided to a caravan; the caravan men direct me to the chapar-khana, where accommodations of the usual rude nature are provided.  Sending into the village for eggs, sugar, and tea, the chapar-khana keeper and stablemen produce a battered samovar, and after frying my supper, they prepare tea; they are poor, ragged fellows, but they seem light-hearted and contented; the siren song of the steaming samovar seems to a waken in their semi-civilized breasts a sympathetic response, and they fall to singing and making merry over tiny glasses of sweetened tea quite as naturally as sailors in a seaport groggery, or Germans over a keg of lager.  Jolly, happy-go-lucky fellows though they outwardly appear, they prove no exception, however, to the general run of their countrymen in the matter of petty dishonesty; although I gave them money enough to purchase twice the quantity of provisions they brought back, besides promising them the customary small present before leaving, in the morning they make a further attempt on my purse under pretence of purchasing more butter to cook the remainder of the eggs.  These are trifling matters to discuss, but they serve to show the wide difference between the character of the peasant classes in Persia and Turkey.  The chapar-khana usually consists of a walled enclosure containing stabling for a large number of horses and quarters for the stablemen and station-keeper.  The quickest mode of travelling in Persia is by chapar, or, in other words, on horseback, obtaining fresh horses at each chapar-khana.  The country east of Turcomanchai consists of rough, uninteresting upland, with nothing to vary the monotony of the journey, until noon, when after wheeling five farsakhs I reach the town of Miana, celebrated throughout the Shah’s dominions for a certain poisonous bug which inhabits the mud walls of the houses, and is reputed to bite the inhabitants while they are sleeping.  The bite is said to produce violent and prolonged fever, and to be even, dangerous to life.  It is customary to warn travellers against remaining over night at Miana, and, of course, I have not by any means been forgotten.  Like most of these alleged dreadful things, it is found upon close investigation to be a big bogey with just sufficient truthfulness about it to play upon the imaginative minds of the people.  The “Miana bug-bear” would, I think, be a more appropriate name than Miana bug.  The people here seem inclined to be rather rowdyish in their reception of a Ferenghi without an escort.  While trundling through the bazaar toward the telegraph station I become the unhappy target for covertly thrown melon-rinds and other unwelcome missiles, for which there appears no remedy except the friendly shelter of the station.  This is