I sat long in the guest chamber of a third acquaintance, the head of the greatest family in Môṣul. So stainless is his lineage that his sisters must remain unwed, since Môṣul cannot provide a husband equal to them in birth. His forebears were Christians who migrated from Diyârbekr two hundred years ago. The legend runs that his Christian ancestor, soon after he had come to Môṣul, went out in the morning to be shaved, but when he reached the barber’s shop it was filled with low-born Moslems and the barber kept him waiting until the heads of the Faithful had been trimmed. “Shall a man of my house wait for such as these?” he cried, and forthwith abjured the creed of slaves. His descendant was one of those who would gladly have seen the new order triumph and give peace to the land. He called down vengeance upon the head of Aḥmed ’Izzet Pasha, one of the worst of the late Sultan’s sycophants, and upon that of his brother, Muṣṭafâ, sometime Vâlî of Môṣul. “If he had stayed two years more he would have ruined the town,” said he. But his hatred of ’Izzet Pasha had not blinded him to the dictates of honour. It happened that by those methods of persuasion of which ’Izzet was master, he had induced my friend to present him with a valuable piece of land. Two months later ’Izzet fell and fled in terror of death from Constantinople, but the beg would not revoke a gift which the disgraced favourite was powerless to exact from him. _Noblesse oblige._ I had also the advantage of conversing with several bishops. Now there are so many bishops in these parts that it is impossible to retain more than a composite impression of them. They correspond in number to the Christian sects, which are as the sands of the sea-shore, but as I was about to journey through districts inhabited by their congregations, I made an attempt to grasp at least the names by which their creeds are distinguished from one another. As for more fundamental distinctions, they depend upon the wording of a metaphysical proposition which I will not offer to define, lest I should fall, like most of my predecessors, into grievous heresy. The most interesting, historically, of these several denominations are the people of Mâr Shim’ûn, some of whom I had met upon the road. They are currently known as Nestorians, though, as Layard has observed, this title is misapplied. The followers of Mâr Shim’ûn are the representatives of the ancient Chaldæan Church, and their race is probably as near to the pure Assyrian stock as can be expected in regions so often conquered, devastated and repeopled. Their church existed before the birth of Nestorius, and was not dependent upon him for its tenets;[144] its doctrines are those of primitive Christianity untouched by the influence of Rome, and its creed, with unimportant verbal differences, is that of Nicæa. After the Council of Ephesus, in 431, the members of the Chaldæan Church separated themselves from those who acknowledged the authority of the Pope.