, the change from a warm climate to a cold one being
responsible for the coat of fur. In the same way, after noting the
complete change that has come over the lizards, we conclude that, if a
colony of the gray species from the other side of the mountains were
brought and turned loose among the green foot-hills here, their
descendants, a few generations hence, would be found with coats as green
as those of the natives. This conviction gathers force from the fact that
no gray lizards whatever are encountered here; all the lizards we see are
green.

Emerging from the foot-hills, we find ourselves in a country the general
appearance of which reminds me of a section of Missouri more than
anything I have seen in Asia. Fields and pastures are fenced in with the
same rude corduroy-fences one sees in the Missouri Valley, some well kept
and others neglected. The pastures are blue grass and white clover; bees
are humming and buzzing from flower to flower, and, to make the
similitude complete, one hears the homely tinkle of cow-bells here and
there. It is difficult to realize that all this is in Persia, and that
one has not been transported in some miraculous manner back to the United
States. A little farther out from the base of the mountains, however, and
we come upon wild figs, pomegranates, and other indigenous evidences of
Eastern soil; and by and by our path almost becomes a tunnel, burrowing
through a wealth of tiger-grass twenty feet high. The fields and little
clearings which, a few miles back, were devoted to the cultivation of
wheat and rye, now become rice-fields overflowed from irrigating ditches,
and in which bare-legged men and women are paddling about, over their
knees in mud and water.

Early in the evening we reach the city of Asterabad, which we find
totally different from the sombre, mud-built cities of the interior. The
wall surrounding it is topped with red tiles, and the outer moat is
choked with rank vegetation. The houses are gabled, and roofed with tiles
or heavy thatch, presenting an appearance very suggestive of the
picturesque towns and villages about Strasburg. The streets are narrow
and ill-paved, and neglect and decay everywhere abound. The cemeteries
are a chaotic mass of tumbledown tombstones and vagrant vegetation. Pools
of water covered with green scum, and heaps of filth everywhere, fill the
reeking atmosphere with malaria and breed big clouds of mosquitoes. The
people have a yellowish, waxy co