them ill informed. The emir is very strict, but
exacts most of his nobles, being, as his subjects
say in his praise, " Killer of elephants and
protector of mice." His face is against luxury.
The palace housekeeping cost less than half a
sovereign a day. When his commandant-in-
chief, who had been a great man in Persia allied
to its royal race, built a handsome one-storied
house in Bokhara, adorned with glass windows
and other luxuries, the emir waited until it
was finished, and then banished its owner for
contempt of religion, confiscated the house, and,
refusing to sell it for a high price that was
offered, pulled it down, ordered the very ruins
to be wasted when they seemed too ornamental,
and, the better to point the moral, sold its timber
to a baker at a mean price for the heating of
his oven.

But with all the glory of Bokhara the Noble,
and all the ostentatious piety, one thing was
noticeable by the hadjis and their fellow-
traveller; they got as much lip-honour as in
Khiva, if not more; but whereas in Khiva
they had been lavishly enriched with gifts, in
Bokhara no man gave them so much as a
farthing, and some were obliged to sell even
their asses for the means of life. Those of the
hadjis who had not branched off already to
their respective homes, were glad, therefore,
when they could, to hire a couple of carts to
carry them on to Samarcand.

Mr. Vámbéry had agreed with his friends to
go on with them to Samarcand, and either
proceed thence eastward with those going
further, or there turn back, and make the return
journey by way of Herat.  A caravan leader
from Herat was in Bokhara who would return
in about three weeks, and a provisional arrangement
was made for meeting with him at Kerki,
on the further bank of the Oxus, if the dervish
did not yield to the temptation to push
onward towards Kashgar, Aksa, and Khoten.
To Samarcand the way was not difficult. Mr.
Vámbéry saw on the road, square milestones,
some entire, others broken, which had been
set up by Timour the Tartar. The present
emir, following his notion of civilisation, has
set up here and there small terraces for
prayer.

Into Samarcand the pious emir was in a few
days about to return from a victorious campaign.
The hadjis wanted to see the entry, and, on the
day after it, Mr. Vámbéry, with a little sense
of renewed danger and suspicion, was
summoned to the presence of the emir. But he
went boldly into the august presence, recited
his prayer, and then, as became his dervish
character, took his seat, without permission,
close to the royal person. The emir—who is
himself a mollah, and to whom the suspicious
minister at Bokhara had made his report—tried
with a fixed look to disconcert the stranger,
but the young Hungarian was not to be
disconcerted. Throughout the interview he
held his own, well ornamenting his speech
with Persian sentences and verses from the
Koran. He was dismissed with a gift, and
the command to visit the emir a second time in
Bokhara.

But now enough had been learnt, enough had
been risked for the sake of learning it, and the
best policy was to quit Samarcand with all
speed and join the caravan for Herat, on the
other bank of the Oxus. Parted unwillingly
from his faithful and kind friends the hadjis,
whom still, for his own sake and theirs, he
dared not undeceive, the sham dervish turned
back, travelled among nomads as a hadji
pedlar, with knives, needles, thread, glass-
beads, and cornelians, in his pack. On the
other side of the Oxus, he and those comrades
with him were seized as runaway slaves making
for Persia. That difficulty was overcome, and
having, through divers other adventures,
arrived at Herat, where he had to resist the
charge of being a disguised Englishman, he left
Herat on the fifteenth of November, by the
great caravan bound for Meshed, and so got
back to Teheran, after his wonderful ten
months' tour, upon which he had set out on
the twenty-eighth of March. Finally, about
the middle of last June, Mr. Vámbéry came
to London to tell his traveller's tale to our
Royal Geographical Society and to the English
public.

NEW WORK BY MR. DICKENS,
In Monthly Parts, uniform with the Original Editions of
"Pickwick," " Copperfleld," &c.
Now publishing, PART XI., price 1s., of
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
BY CHARLES DICKENS.
IN TWENTY MONTHLY PARTS.
With Illustrations by MARCUS STONE.
London: CHAPMAN and HALL, 193, Piccadilly.
Just published, bound in cloth, price 5s. 6d.,
THE TWELFTH VOLUME.

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