the groom.

It begins raining before I retire for the night; it rains incessantly all
night, and is raining heavily when I awake in the morning. The weather
clears up at noon, but it is useless thinking of pushing on, for miles of
tenacious mud intervene between the village and the gravelly desert;
moreover, the prospect of the fine weather holding out looks anything but
reassuring. The villagers are all at home, owing to the saturated
condition of their fields, and I come in for no small share of worrying
attention during the afternoon. A pilgrim from Teheran turns up and tells
the people about my appearance before the Shah; this increases their
interest in me to an unappreciated extent, and, with glistening eyes and
eagerly rubbing fingers, they ask "Chand pool Padishah?" (How much money
did the King give you?) "I showed the Shah the bicycle, and the Shah
showed me the lions, and tigers, and panthers at Doshan Tepe," I tell
them; and a knowing customer, called Meshedi Ali, enlightens them still
further by telling them I am not a luti to receive money for letting the
Shah-in-Shah see me ride. Still, luti or no luti, the people think I
ought to have received a present. I am worried to ride so incessantly
that I am forced to seek self-protection in pretending to have sprained
my ankle, and in returning to the chapar-khana with a hypocritical limp.
I station myself ostensibly for the remainder of the day on the
bala-khana front, and busy myself in taking observations of the villagers
and their doings.

Time was, among ourselves, or more correctly, among our ancestors, when
blood-letting was as much the professional calling of a barber as
scraping chins or trimming hair, and when our respected beef-eating and
beer-drinking forefathers considered wholesale blood-letting as a
well-nigh universal panacea for fleshly ills. In travelling through
Persia, one often observes things that suggest very strikingly those
"good old days" of Queen Bess. The citizens of Zendjan offering the Shah
a present of 60,000 tomans, as an inducement not to visit their city, as
they did when he was on his way to Europe, has a true Elizabethan ring
about it, a suggestion of the Virgin Queen's rabble retinue travelling
about, devouring and destroying, and of justly apprehensive citizens,
seeing ruin staring them in the face, petitioning their regal mistress to
spare them the dread calamity of a royal visit.

The ancient Zoroastrian barber, no doubt,