children, by which means their very first ideas were
trained to be inimical to the race of Omar. I mean,' said the mollah,
'that which you no doubt very well remember: when a little boy in
schooltime is pressed upon certain occasions to ask his master's leave
to retire, the form of words in which he is enjoined to make his request
is "_Lahnet beh Omar!_ curse be upon Omar!" I dare say you have through
life, as I have, never omitted to unite the name of Omar with everything
that is unclean, and at least once a day to repeat the curse which you
were taught at school.'

I fully assented to this, and then he proceeded with his story.

'My father's hatred for the sectaries of Omar extended itself to all
sorts of infidels. Jews, Christians, fire-worshippers, and worshippers
of images, all came within the scope of his execration; and what at
first he had practised from motives of ambition, at length became the
ruling principle of his nature. His family, and I among the number, were
brought up in his tenets, and imbibed all his violent prejudices; and so
much did we hang together by them that we formed as it were a distinct
sect,--the terror of infidels, and the most zealous upholders of the
Shiah faith.

'After this you will not be surprised at the part I lately took in the
destruction of the Armenian wine-jars at Tehran. But that is not the
only scrape my zeal has led me into. Very early in life, when still a
student at Hamadan, I was involved in a terrible disturbance, of which I
was the principal promoter.

'An ambassador from the Pasha of Bagdad, with his suite, was quietly
taking his road through our city, having sojourned there two or three
days on his way to the court of the Shah, when burning to put into
practice my father's lessons, I collected a band of young fanatics like
myself, and, making them an appropriate address, I so excited their
passions that we resolved to perform some feat worthy of our principles.
We determined to attack our Turkish guests, inform them of the curses
we denounced against Omar, and invite them to become adherents to the
doctrine of Ali. Heedless, and, perhaps, ignorant of what is due to the
character of _elchi_, or ambassador, we only saw in Suleiman Effendi an
enemy to the Shiahs, and one calling himself a Suni. One day, as he
was setting forth from his house to visit the governor of Hamadan, we
gathered ourselves into a body and greeted him by loud cries of "Curses
be upon Omar!" T