How bare the world must appear to those two little children. Children here who live in the country can hardly imagine any boundary to the wonderful green tangle that they can see on every side of them. And children who live in towns look out every day upon wonderful human works, which, although they are not as marvellous as God’s country, yet puzzle them very much as to how they were ever made. With a Persian child it is quite different. In many places the children do not know what wild growth is, and if you talk of continuous country, hundred miles after hundred miles of field and wood and meadow, they think you are telling an impossible fairy tale. While as for the little town children, the buildings which they see all round them made of sun-dried bricks and earth, the barrels and the thousand and one household utensils formed of exactly the same material, or perhaps of clay very roughly baked in a primitive kiln, seem to them hardly more artificial and man-made than the corn in the walled gardens outside the city, which they see watered twice a week. They have a very different life from you and me. Little Ahmad was a sturdy, jolly little lad of four when I knew him, and, though he ought to have known better, he used to call after me (if his parents were out of hearing) the rhyme so familiar to Europeans in Persia-- _Ferangi, Chi rang-i, Palang-i,_ which, translated into English, means-- European, What colour art thou? Thou art a leopard. He lived in a really beautiful house, built of sun-dried bricks and clay, and whitened inside with a smooth coat of plaster of Paris. The rooms were large and very nicely furnished with beautiful Persian carpets, and a mattress and pillows of gay designs, and Ahmad, little rascal though he was, would never have dreamed of treading on those carpets with his shoes on; all shoes were left at the door. One small table for the tea-urn completed the furniture. And upstairs? Upstairs was the roof, such a lovely large flat roof, Ahmad loved it, and he often terrified his mother by the way he leaned over the low wall to look down at the street, for the house had no window looking to the road. All the windows looked into the garden, which might be said to be in the middle of the house, for the rooms were built round it. The windows, too, were all doors; some of the rooms had as many as five double doors all in a row, and when they were all open the room was very airy and bright.