Comic sets copied from the illustrated papers were very easily made, and came out exceedingly well on the sheet and afforded great amusement. This system, and the cutting out in paper, is very simple, and of course takes much less time than the colored and varnished drawings on roughened glass. THE AKHOOND OF SWAT. By J. H. S. A number of years ago there came over the cable an announcement that the Akhoond of Swat had died, and immediately there was an outburst of merriment in the newspapers. No one could tell who or what he was, many believed him to be a myth, and for a long time the Akhoond was a standing joke among paragraph writers all over the world. But the Akhoond was a real personage and no joke, and it is only recently that we have found out what a really great man he was. Swat itself is a considerable province of Afghanistan, bordering on India, and just southwest of the Pamirs. The Akhoond was not, however, its civil ruler. At any rate, he was not nominally so. The title Akhoond merely means "teacher," and he was, primarily, a religious teacher and nothing more. He lived in the town of Saidu, and he reached manhood and began to teach the people more than half a century ago, when Dost Mohammed was Ameer of Cabul. An intense fanatic and a mystic, he exerted a marvelous sway over the people of Swat, who like all the Afghan tribes, are nervous, imaginative, and given to mysticism. So he became not only their spiritual prophet, but their military leader as well. He led the hosts of Islam against the Sikhs, in the days when Dost Mohammed planned to conquer all India, and many are the stories told of his prowess. Nor did he fight alone against the Indians, but in 1863 he led the Afghans in their battle with the British at Umbeyla, and made himself the most feared man in all the Afghan empire. When not busy in the wars, the Akhoond was always to be found at Saidu. From sunrise to sunset he sat in his mosque, reproving the erring, comforting the mourners, encouraging the faithful, and cursing the obstinate unbelievers. Disputes of every sort were brought to him for settlement. Troubles of all kinds were brought to him to be made right. Hundreds of miracles were performed by him every day. The sick were made well in an instant. A man would come, lamenting that his horse was lost, and would find it the next moment at the door of the mosque. A carpenter was bewailing that a beam was three feet too short for the needed purpose, and in a twinkling it grew to exactly the length required. A visitor in the city wished to return speedily to his home in Constantinople, thousands of miles away. He was bade to close his eyes, and the next moment opened them in his home. To tell the people of Swat that these things were not so, would have been equivalent to telling them that light was darkness. No wonder, then, that the Akhoond was a power in the land, and that Ameer after Ameer sought his assistance.