given orders, as the money was paid, that it should
remain in the hands of the cutwall for us. This I found afterwards to be
true, and the cutwall has promised to finish in three days, desiring me
to send no more to Asaph Khan on that business.

I must not omit to mention here, an anecdote of baseness or favour, call
it which you please. When the prisons are full of condemned men, the
king commands some to be executed, and sends others to his omrahs, to be
redeemed at a price. This he esteems a courtesy, as giving the means of
exercising charity: But he takes the money, and so sells the virtue.
About a month before our remove, he sent to me to buy three Abyssinians,
whom they suppose to be all Christians, at the price of forty rupees
each. I answered, that I could not purchase men as slaves, as was done
by others, by which they had profit for their money; but that I was
willing to give twenty rupees each for them in charity, to save their
lives and restore them to liberty. The king was well pleased with my
answer, and ordered them to be sent me. They expected the money, which I
was in no haste to give, and even hoped it had been forgotten. But the
king's words are all written down[217], and are as irrevocable decrees.
Seeing that I sent not for the malefactors, his officers delivered them
into the hands of my _procurator_, in my absence this day, taking his
note for the sixty rupees, which I paid at my return, and set free the
prisoners.

[Footnote 217: Dixit, et edictum est; fatur, et est factum.--_Purch_.]

Having notice of a new phirmaund sent down to Surat to disarm all the
English, and some other restrictions upon their liberty, owing to a
complaint sent up to the prince, that we intended to build a fort at
Swally, and that our ships were laden with bricks and lime for that
purpose, I visited Asaph Khan on the 10th November, to enquire into this
matter. This jealousy arose from our people having landed a few bricks
on shore, for building a furnace to refound the ship's bell; yet the
alarm was so hot at court, that I was called to make answer, when I
represented how absurd was this imaginary fear, how dishonourable for
the king, and how unfit the place was for any such purpose to us, having
neither water nor harbourage. The jealousy was however so very strongly
imprinted in their minds, because I had formerly asked a river at Gogo
for that purpose, that I could hardly satisfy the prince but that we
intended some s