Though the Colonel was a good Persian scholar, he could not make much of the guides and post-house keepers, who are all Turks; and very few of them speak Persian, Turkish being the language of the country. It is not till some four stages past Tabriz that Persian is the dialect of the peasant. The reigning family, too, affect to think and speak in Turkish with their relatives and families; but it is not the Turkish of Constantinople, but the rougher speech of Tabriz, the cause being probably that at some period of their early life they have resided at Tabriz, where nothing else but Turkish is spoken; of course, it is also their ancestral tongue. We got safely to our third post-house, at half-past three, got fresh horses, and started. The warmth of the last two stages had ceased, and patches of snow were getting more frequent; but I felt, though sorely against the grain, that as long as the Colonel would go on I ought not to object, under penalty of being thought a muff. Our steeds were bad; we couldn’t get more than a walk out of them, and we were six hours doing the stage, which we reached chilled to the bone. I was indeed delighted to hear from the Colonel that “it was hardly worth while pushing on!” and as I scrambled into the bare and blackened room which the postmaster allotted to us, and busied myself in getting a light, I was grateful that even the Colonel’s ideas of duty were satisfied. Of course, afterwards, such a day’s posting came to be looked on as a joke; but sixty-eight miles, over bad roads, to a man not accustomed to the saddle, is a serious matter. Our first care was to get the postmaster, a poor ragged fellow, to light a fire of brushwood; a fierce blaze that thoroughly warmed the room, and at the same time filled the place with smoke, was the result. Then he bethought him that the chimney was stopped up with a brick; the brick was removed, and more brushwood put on. Then he gave us a carpet on loan, brought some firewood and the scales to weigh it; the weights were big stones, the scales two baskets slung on a stick. There were recesses some yard from the ground all round the room, which was some eight feet by twelve. The floor was earth, the walls mud, the roof big poles with branches of trees laid across them. In the recesses we stuck three candles. The walls and roof were polished black from the smoke of many fires. In the part of the room near the door were flung our saddles and luggage. No furniture of any kind; we got the bullock-trunk forward to use as a table.