just outside the town, and before the gate is reached, stones are exchanged for melon-rinds, but fortunately without any serious damage being done.  Mr. F—­, a young German operator, has charge of the control-station here, and welcomes me most cordially to share his comfortable quarters, urging me to remain with him several days.  I gladly accept his hospitality till tomorrow morning.  Mr. F—­ has a brother who has recently become a Mussulman, and married a couple of Persian wives; he is also residing temporarily at Miana.  He soon comes around to the telegraph station, and turns out to be a wild harum-skarum sort of a person, who regards his transformation into a Mussulman and the setting up of a harem of his own as anything but a serious affair.  As a reward for embracing the Mohammedan religion and becoming a Persian subject the Shah has given him a sum of money and a position in the Tabreez mint, besides bestowing upon him the sounding title of Mirza Ab-dul Karim Khan.  It seems that inducements of a like substantial nature are held out to any Ferenghi of known respectability who formally embraces the Shiite branch of the Mohammedan religion, and becomes a Persian subject — a rare chance for chronic ne’er-do-wells among ourselves, one would think.

This novel and festive convert to Islam readily gives me a mental peep behind the scenes of Persian domestic life, and would unhesitatingly have granted me a peep in person had such a thing been possible.  Imagine the ordinary costume of an opera-bouffe artist, shorn of all regard for the difference between real indecency and the suggestiveness of indelicacy permissible behind the footlights, and we have the every-day costume of the Persian harem.  In the dreamy eventide the lord of the harem usually betakes himself to that characteristic institution of the East and proceeds to drive dull care away by smoking the kalian and watching an exhibition of the terpsichorean talent of his wives or slaves.  This does not consist of dancing, such as we are accustomed to understand the art, but of graceful posturing and bodily contortions, spinning round like a coryphee, with hand aloft, and snapping their fingers or clashing tiny brass cymbals; standing with feet motionless and wriggling the joints, or bending backward until their loose, flowing tresses touch the ground.  Persians able to afford the luxury have their womens’ apartment walled with mirrors, placed at appropriate angles, so that when enjoying these exhibitions of his wives’ abilities he finds himself not merely in the presence of three or six wives, as the case may be, but surrounded on all sides by scores of airy-fairy nymphs, and amid the dreamy fumes and soothing bubble-bubbling of his kalian can imagine himself the happy — or one would naturally think, unhappy — possessor of a hundred.  The effect of this mirror-work arrangement can be better imagined than described.