individual who acted as prompter on
that occasion. One of the performers appeared on the stage sufficiently
charged with stage-fright to cause him to entirely forget his piece.
Expecting every moment to get the cue from the prompter's box, what was
his horror to hear, after waiting what probably seemed to him about an
hour, instead of the cue, in a hoarse whisper that could be distinctly
heard all over the room, the comforting remark, "I say, Charlie, I've
lost the blooming place!"

The American missionaries have a small chapel in Teheran, and on Sunday
morning we sometimes used to go; the little congregation gathered there
was composed of strange elements collected together from far-off places.
From Colonel F ______, the grizzled military adventurer, now in the
Shah's service, and who was also with Maximilian in Mexico, to the young
American lady who is said to have turned missionary and come,
broken-hearted, to the distant East because her lover had died a few days
before they were to be married, they are an audience of people each with
a more or less adventurous history. It is perfectly natural that it
should be so; it is the irrepressible spirit of adventure that is either
directly or indirectly responsible for their presence here.

Half an hour after the echoes of the three cheers and the "tiger" have
died away finds me wet-footed and engaged in fording a series of
aggravating little streams, that obstruct my path so frequently that to
stop and shed one's foot-gear for each soon becomes an intolerable
nuisance. I should think I can lay claim, without exaggeration, to
crossing fifty of these streams inside of ten miles. A good-sized stream
emerges from the Elburz foot-hills; after reaching the plain it follows
no regular channel, but spreads out like an open fan into a gradually
widening area of small streams, that play their part in irrigating a few
scattering fields and gardens, and are then lost in the sands of the
desert to the south. Situated where it can derive the most benefit from
these streams is the village of Sherifabad, and beyond Sherifabad
stretches a verdureless waste to Aivan-i-Kaif. On this desert, I sit
down, for a few minutes, on one of those little mounds of stones piled up
at intervals to mark the road when the trail is buried beneath the winter
snows; a green-turbaned descendant of the Prophet, bestriding a bay
horse, comes from the opposite direction, stops, dismounts, squats down
on his hams