SHIRAZ TO BUSHIEE. 37 



increase his courage, and add much to his powers of 

 endurance. On several occasions I tried to persuade 

 him that, in my humble opinion, such a belief was 

 founded on error ; but I never succeeded in shaking 

 his faith one bit. Another fancy of his was that 

 my horse shoiild wear an ornament in the shape of a 

 leathern collar bedecked with silver, and with some 

 verses of the blessed Koran sewn inside of it : this, 

 he declared, would most assuredly keep the horse fat, 

 and drive off all manner of diseases. As such an 

 ornament was much at variance with my own ideas as 

 to what was proper, I told him that really I could not 

 hear of such a thing ; and after much remonstrance 

 on his part, I finally triumphed. But I believe this 

 was the only single instance in which I persuaded him 

 to let me do as I wished regarding my own horses. 



We were in the saddle, as I said before, by eight 

 o'clock, a much later hour than is usual for the morn- 

 ing start in Persia. But we proposed making only a 

 short march that day, and the mid-day heat we were 

 to pass at the house of a Swedish doctor, the only 

 European resident at Shiraz. Oddly enough, my 

 companion, alter having travelled over for the last 

 two years Southern Europe, Asia Minor, and Persia, 

 met his first fellow - countryman at Shiraz. What 

 the doctor's name was I forget, but his history, in a 

 few words, was this : He had been thirteen years in 

 Persia. He had left his own country when quite a 

 lad, and had wandered through Turkey and Persia. 



