ropean settlement.

One single man is employed after dark to set the lamps alight, and when
he has got to the end of the two streets he proceeds on his return
journey to blow them all out again. By ten o'clock everything is in
perfect darkness.

The Company now claim that they have fulfilled their agreement!

The Belgian Company for the manufacture of Beetroot Sugar was another
example of how speculations sometimes go wrong, and no wonder. In theory
the venture seemed quite sound, for the consumption of sugar in Persia is
large, and if it had been possible to produce cheap sugar in the country
instead of importing it from Russia, France and India, huge profits would
have been probable; but here again the same mistake was made as by the
gas company. The obtaining of the raw material was neglected.

The sugar refinery was built at great cost in this case, too, machinery
was imported to manufacture the three qualities of sugar most favoured by
the Persians--loaf sugar, crystallised sugar, and sugar-candy,--but all
this was done before ascertaining whether it was possible to grow the
right quality of beetroot in sufficient quantities to make the concern
pay. Theoretically it was proved that it would be possible to produce
local sugar at a price which, while leaving the Company a huge profit,
would easily beat Russian sugar, by which French and Indian sugar have
now been almost altogether supplanted.

A model farm was actually started (and is still in existence) near
Shah-Abdul Azim, where beetroot was to be grown in large quantities, the
experts declaring that the soil was better suited for the crop than any
to be found in Europe. Somehow or other it did not answer as well as
expected. Moreover, the question of providing coal for the engines
proved--as in the case of the Gas Company--to be another serious
stumbling block. An attempt to overcome this difficulty by joining with
the Gas Company in working the Lalun Mines was made, but, alas! proved an
expensive failure.

Moreover, further difficulties were encountered in obtaining the right
manure for the beetroots, in order that the acids, which delay
crystallisation, might be eliminated; and the inexperience, carelessness
and reluctance with which the natives took up the new cultivation--and,
as it did not pay, eventually declined to go on with it--render it by no
means strange that the sugar factory, too, which was to make the fortunes
of so many became a derelict ent