ramifications leading toward what looks, like a particularly rough and dingy quarter.  Before going many steps I am halted by a friendly-faced sugar merchant, with “Sahib,” and sundry significant shakes of the head, signifying, if he were me, he wouldn’t go up there.  And thus it is in the Teheran bazaar; where a Ferenghi will get insulted once, he will find a dozen ready to interpose with friendly officiousness between him and anything likely to lead to unpleasant consequences.  On the whole, a European fares better than a Persian in his national costume would in an Occidental city, in spite of the difference between our excellent police regulations and next to no regulations at all; he fares better than a Chinaman does in New York.  The Teheran bazaar, though nothing to compare to the world-famous bazaar at Stamboul, is wonderfully extensive.  I was under the impression that I had been pretty much all through it at different times; but a few days after my visit to the “slummy " quarters, I follow a party of corpse-bearers down a passage-way hitherto unexplored, to try and be present at a Persian funeral, and they led the way past at least a mile of shops I had never yet seen.  I followed the corpse-bearers through the dark passages and narrow alley-ways of the poorer native quarter, and in spite of the lowering brows of the followers, penetrated even into the house where they washed the corpses before burial; but here the officiating mollahs scowled with such unmistakable displeasure, and refused to proceed in my presence, so that I am forced to beat a retreat.  The poorer native quarter of Teheran is a shapeless jumble of mud dwellings, and ruins of the same; the streets are narrow passages describing all manner of crooks and angles in and out among them.  As I emerge from the vaulted bazaar the sun is almost setting, and the musicians in the bala-khanas of the palace gates are ushering in the close of another day with discordant blasts from ancient Persian trumpets, and belaboring hemispherical kettle- drums.  These musicians are dressed in fantastic scarlet uniforms, not unlike the costume of a fifteen century jester, and every evening at sundown they repair to these balakhanas, and for the space of an hour dispense the most unearthly music imaginable. tubes of brass about five feet long, which respond to the efforts of a strong-winded person, with a diabolical basso-profundo shriek that puts a Newfoundland fog-horn entirely in the shade.  When a dozen of these instruments are in full blast, without any attempt at harmony, it seems to shed a depressing shadow of barbarism over the whole city.  This sunset music is, I think, a relic of very old times, and it jars on the nerves like the despairing howl of ancient Persia, protesting against the innovation from the pomp and din and glamour of her old pagan glories, to the present miserable era of mollah rule and feeble dependence for national existence on the forbearance or jealousy of other nations.  Beneath the musicians’ gate, and I emerge into a small square which is half taken up by a square tank of water; near the tank is a large bronze cannon.  It is a huge, unwieldy piece, and a muzzle-loader, utterly useless to such a people as the Persians, except for ornament, or perhaps to help impress the masses with an idea of the Shah’s unapproachable greatness.