wild, rambling pattern of our own ideas
concerning the shape this garment ought to assume. The legs, instead of
being gathered, Oriental fashion, at the ankles, dangle loosely about the
feet; and yet it is these same legs that are the chief distinguishing
feature of the pants. One of the legs, cut off and sewed up at one end,
would make the nicest kind of an eight-bushel grain sack; rather too
wide, perhaps, in proportion to the depth, to make a shapely grain sack,
but there is no question about the capacity for the eight bushels. No
doubt these people would be puzzled to say why they are wearing yards and
yards of stuff that is not only useless, but positively in the way,
except that it has been the fashion in Aradan from time immemorable to do
so. These simple Persian peasants, when they make any pretence of
sprucing up, probably find themselves quite as much enslaved by fashion
as our very fastidious selves; a wide difference betaken ourselves and
them, however, being, that while they cling tenaciously to some
prehistoric style of garment, and regard innovations with abhorrence,
fashion demands of us to be constantly changing.

The Aradan telegraph-jee is a young man skin-full of piety, rejoicing in
the possession of a nice little praying-carpet, a praying-stone from holy
Kerbela, the holiest of all except Mecca, and he owns a string of beads
of the same soul-comforting material as the stone. During his waking
hours he is seldom without the rosary in his hand, passing the holy beads
back and forth along the string; and five times a day he produces the
praying-stone from its little leathern pouch and goes through the
ceremony of saying his prayers, with becoming earnestness. At eventide,
when he spreads his praying-carpet and places the little oblong tablet
from Kerbela in its customary position, preparatory to commencing his
last prayers for the day, it is furthermore ascertained by the compass
that he has been pretty accurate in his daily prostrations toward Mecca.
With all these enviable advantages--the praying-carpet, the praying-stone,
the holy rosary, and the happy accuracy as regards Mecca--the Aradan
telegraph-jee is a Mussulman who ought to feel tolerably certain of a
rose-garden, a gurgling rivulet, and any number of black-eyed houris to
contribute to his happiness in the paradise he hopes to enter beyond the
tomb.

Indications have not been wanting during the day that the weather is in
anything but a settl