rated with wreaths and flowers in
the most fantastic manner, and sell sweetmeats, cardamums, betelnuts,
&c., upon stalls, displaying their charms to the passers-by. I took a
turn here one evening with five others, and found crowds of people
collected, both strangers and residents: nor do they ordinarily
disperse till long after midnight." On the second day after his visit
to this scene of gaiety, he received notice that the ship was ready
for sea; and on the 8th of Mohurrum 1256, (March 13, 1840,) he
accordingly embarked with his baggage and servants on board the
Edinburgh, which was towed in seven days, by a steamer, down the river
to Saugor; and the pilot quitting her the next day at the floating
light. "I now found myself," (says the khan,) "for the first time in
my life, in the great ocean, where nothing was to be seen around but
sky and water."

[14] _Taziya_, literally _grief_, is an ornamental
shrine erected in Moslem houses during the Mohurrum, and
intended to represent the mausoleum of Hassan and
Hussein, at Kerbelah in Persia. On the 10th and last day
of the mourning, the taziyas are carried in procession
to the outside of the city, and finally deposited with
funeral rites in the burying-grounds.--See _Mrs Meer
Hassan Ali's_ Observations on the Mussulmans of India.
Letter I.

The account of a voyage at sea, as given by an Oriental, is usually
the most deplorable of narratives--filled with exaggerated fears, the
horrors of sea-sickness, and endless lamentations of the evil fate of
the writer, in being exposed to such a complication of miseries. Of
the wailing of Mirza Abu-Talib we have already given a specimen: and
the Persian princes, even in the luxurious comfort of an English
Mediterranean steamer, seem to have fared but little better, in their
own estimation at least, than the Mirza in his dirty and disorderly
Danish merchantman. "Our bones cried, 'Alas! for this evil there is no
remedy.' We were vomiting all the time, and thus afflicted with
incurable evils, in the midst of a sea which appears without end, the
state of my health bad, the sufferings of my brothers very great, and
no hope of being saved, we became most miserable." Such is the naive
exposition of his woes, by H. R. H. Najaf Kooli Mirza; but Kerim Khan
appears, both physically and morally, to have been made of different
metal. Ere he had been two days on board we find him remarking--"I had
by this time m