special mention.

The first is a small party of Americans, of which the writer was one,
seated with their families in ancient post-chaises rumbling along the
tiresome road from Enzeli, the Persian port on the Caspian Sea, toward
Teheran. It was in the early days of May, 1911, and from these medieval
vehicles, drawn by four ratlike ponies, in heat and dust, we gained our
first physical impressions of the land where we had come to live for
some years--to mend the broken finances of the descendants of Cyrus and
Darius. We were fired with the ambition to succeed in our work, and,
viewed through such eyes, the physical discomforts became unimportant.
Hope sang loud in our hearts as the carriages crawled on through two
hundred and twenty miles of alternate mountain and desert scenery.

The second picture is eight months later, almost to the day. On January
11, 1912, I stood in a circle of gloomy American and Persian friends in
front of the Atabak palace where we had been living, about to step into
the automobile that was to bear us back over the same road to Enzeli.
The mountains behind Teheran were white with snow, the sun shone
brightly in a clear blue sky, there was life-tonic in the air, but none
in our hearts, for our work in Persia, hardly begun, had come to a
sudden end.

Between the two dates some things had happened--things that may be
written down, but will probably never be undone--and the hopes of a
patient, long-exploited people of reclaiming their position in the
world had been stamped out ruthlessly and unjustly by the armies of a
so-called Christian and civilized nation.

Prior to 1906, the masses of the Persians had suffered in comparative
silence from the ever-growing tyranny and betrayal of successive
despots, the last of whom, Muhammad Ali Shah, a vice-sodden monster of
the most perverted type, openly avowed himself the tool of Russia. The
people, finally stung to a blind desperation and exhorted by their
priests, rose in the summer of 1906, and by purely passive
measures--such as taking sanctuary, or _bast_, in large numbers in
sacred places and in the grounds of the British Legation at
Teheran--succeeded in obtaining from Muzaffarn'd Din Shah, the father
of Muhammad Ali, a constitution which he granted some six months before
his death.

The pledge given in this document his son and successor swore to fulfil
and then violated a dozen or more times, until the long-suffering
constitutionalists, who ca