THE EUROPEAN EESIDEXTS. 147 



of nationalities was most curious. There were only two 

 Englisk subjects — one, Dr. Cormick, the physician in 

 charge of the Shah's son, the other a Maltese. There 

 were, besides, some pleasant Swiss gentlemen, a French- 

 man, and a young Italian, an ex-Garibaldian ; the latter 

 two kept up a constant fire of good-natured chaff on 

 European politics in general, and the relations between the 

 Pope and the French Emperor in particular. We gathered a 

 great deal of information, which was new to us, about the 

 internal condition of Persia and its Government. Crime 

 seems to be repressed with a strong hand, and with the 

 indifference to human life common in the East ; 1,200 

 executions have taken place at Tabreez in the last nine 

 years. We were told that death is inflicted in the 

 quietest way, and that both the headsman and his victim 

 behave like perfect gentlemen. The one lights his long 

 ' kalian,' smokes a little, and passes it to the other, who 

 has his whiff; and after hobnobbing thus for a while, the 

 agent of the law remarks, by some Oriental periphrasis, 

 ' Time's up,' and chops off his companion's head with neat- 

 ness and despatch. Detected coiners still suffer the 

 penalty of having their ears nailed to a post, and an 

 instance of this punishment occurred during our stay, but 

 we missed seeing it. Of public amusements Tabreez has 

 few ; we were just too late to see a kind of Oriental mira- 

 cle-play, which had been performed in one of the squares, 

 in which Jacob, Joseph, and Solomon, who are equally 

 revered by Mahommedans and Christians, had been brought 

 on the stage. One day we stopped to look at a tame 

 lioness in the street ; the poor animal had been partially 

 blinded, and her performance was not of a very lively 

 character — to us at least, who could not understand the 

 jokes of her showman. We should like to have visited 

 the Sultan-Dagh Mountains, where the European resi- 

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