The mosques are at night the casual wards of Persia; there sleep those who have absolutely no home and no business, and entrance is always free to all comers. The busy use the numerous caravanserais. There were lofty minarets, from whence is made the call to prayers, and numerous little cells windowed with the old elaborate carpentry of the East, and their beautiful tracery often papered over by the inmate to render his cell warmer in winter; a bit of matting, a box, and a few books, were the contents of most of them, in the corner being a small carpet, which formed the place of honour by day and the bed at night. The students are all either divinity or law, aged from eighteen upwards; and an Ispahan lawyer or priest, on finishing his education, is looked on by Persians as the type of hypocrisy and _finesse_. Many of the mūllas (priests) are not, however, bad fellows when one can break through the crust of _apparent_ moroseness and fanaticism; they are mostly at heart freethinkers, many Deists, more Atheists, few being good Mussulmans. Leaving the college and still proceeding up the Char Bagh, a building on the right contains the Persian telegraph-office. The office is for the local traffic, and the Persians have possession, by convention, of one of the wires of the line; they do their own local traffic, but the line is kept up by the English staff of the Persian Telegraph Department. At intervals in the Char Bagh are large hauz (tanks), most of them in ruins, but during winter generally full of water; all down the centre runs a watercourse a yard and a half wide—alas! dry—edged by huge blocks of hewn stone and bridged at intervals. On either side of this watercourse is a paved stone causeway ten feet wide edged by similar hewn stones; along the edges under the walls is another paved road of less width; between these causeways are wide beds once covered with flowers and fruit-trees, now only sown with clover and barley, which in the early spring gives, with the huge plane-trees, a fine _coup d’œil_. The Char Bagh ends in a gateway of more lofty pretensions, but of the same style of architecture as the buildings on either side. Here, however, are a few tiles representing scenes in the chase, probably made during the Afghan occupation.