The words one uses in a letter in Persian, even for the commonest objects, are almost entirely distinct from the words one uses conversationally, and the words which one would use in an ordinary prose history book are again different. Then it is almost impossible to distinguish the tenses; the true future is hardly ever used, consequently the present and the future are indistinguishable; and the preterite is frequently used of action which was begun in the past but which is still continuing. Lastly, the adjective is generally indistinguishable from the substantive, and the link between an adjective and the term which it qualifies is the same as the sign of the genitive. For instance the text, “This is My beloved Son,” may be read in the Persian Bible, “This is the son of My beloved” without the slightest violence to the grammar; nor, indeed, is there any obvious way out of the difficulty. I have mentioned these peculiarities of language because I think they are greatly connected with the Yezdi’s inaccuracy of ideas, though which is the cause and which is the effect is sometimes difficult to say. There is no situation in which the Yezdi is so incalculable as that which seems to demand a certain amount of daring. Sometimes the people seem absolutely wanting in the power of taking the initiative, and expect to be directed like children. They have an aversion to killing animals except for food, even when there is danger to human life in allowing them to live. One day an English lady asked why a dangerous dog which had bitten several people was not killed. The answer was, “If you tell us to kill it we will do so, but not otherwise.” The fact is no one minded killing the dog, but they fancied the curse might lie with the initiator of the movement. They will go on letting things be, or allowing them to get more and more dangerous, until they have accustomed themselves to an amount of risk to incur which would be accounted by a European mere foolhardiness. In this they are largely influenced by predestinarian notions. An English lady was one day standing by an open tank in a Persian compound, into which one of the children had fallen that morning, and she remarked on its extreme danger. “Yes,” said the mother, “I have lost three children in that tank.” To build a small wall round such a tank would be in Persia exceedingly easy. Perhaps the little power of initiative that is left them by their predestinarianism is destroyed by the insecurity of the country. People get in the way of making as few improvements as possible, and of never exposing their capital more than they can help. In fraudulent business, however, there is a great deal of audacity, sometimes combined with a good deal of ingenuity. They are exporting at present to China a quality of so-called opium in which there is absolutely no morphia. The stuff is really an entirely different substance, and very cheap, and it is tied up in bags steeped in a solution of opium.