A steep descent over a broad but good road brings one to the wide space between the two royal gardens. Here on the Thursday night the youth and bloods of Shiraz meet to race and show off their handsome horses and exhibit their gayest attire. Pistols are discharged, and light sticks, flung when at full gallop against the ground, are caught after having rebounded high in air; below the gardens, in the cemetery at one side of this Rotten Row of Shiraz, and only separated from it by a low wall, promenade the Shiraz ladies in search of fun, or it may be intrigue. Veiled as they are, all are outwardly decorous; but the laughter, the songs, and the frequent glimpses of very pretty faces and soft brown eyes of a lustrousness only seen in the East, and the tendency that the gayer of the cavaliers have to saunter or show off their horses along the cemetery side, and their frequent purchases of nuts and melon-seeds from the peripatetic dealers with which the place is thronged, seem to point that the groups of laughing veiled ladies are the attraction. Certain it is that visits to this cemetery are generally made on the sly by the ladies of Shiraz. One soon finds out that one has reached another country. Instead of the thrift of the Ispahani and his mortified look—his dress made purely for comfort and economy, and his donkey or ambling pony—the Shirazi smiling, joking, singing, clad if he can by any means attain it in gayest-coloured silk, the turban frequently discarded, even among the aged, for the jaunty hat of finest cloth or lambskin, the well-dyed and kept moustaches, and the long love-locks, with the hat of the smallest size and latest mode cocked with a knowing air among the beaux; the universal pistols at the holsters, the well-appointed and gay horse-trappings, and the well-bred, well-fed, well-groomed horses, all with some breed in them, like their riders. These men are a different race from the more northern Persians; polite, at times _debonnair_, they seem to enjoy life, and are in no way the down-trodden race that the Ispahani seems; with them it is a word and a blow. There is little fanaticism and some religion. Greyhounds, hawks, and even half-bred hunting dogs of sorts abound, and all are clean and well-looking. As one approaches the walls, which are much ruined and surrounded by a dry ditch, the garden of Dilgoosha (heart’s-ease), the property of the Kawam, the hereditary calamter or mayor of the town, and another huge Government garden, the Bagh-i-Takht (or throne garden), with numerous private ones stretching in every direction, varying in size from two to one hundred and fifty acres, come into sight.