He used to beg for his food, sit in our hands, allow himself to be stroked, and became a great pet with both of us; but, as he showed a great disinclination to be tied up, we allowed him to live in his hole in the wall. As he grew fat from good living, he discontinued his nocturnal excursions, presenting himself at meals with great regularity; his intelligence was great, and the servants, who hated him, and looked on him as “nejis,” or unclean, kept carefully out of his way; as did the dogs, most of whom had been bitten severely, and the suddenness of his movements and the sharpness of his cries terrified them. The beast, too, had another mode of defending himself, which I am glad to say he only resorted to once when hard pressed. Two of the dogs had got him in a corner, when suddenly they both bolted, and the delleh made for his hole in a dignified manner. He had employed the mode of defence used by the skunk, and the particular corner of the courtyard, and the two dogs and the delleh were unapproachable for a fortnight. However, the animal had no stronger odour than any other carnivorous beast, _save on this occasion_, and it probably was his only means of safety. After he had inhabited his hole some months, while he was gambolling on our platform, I saw the head of a second delleh cautiously protruded and rapidly withdrawn. He had been joined by a female, and after a week or two, she too became quite tame. Like the ferret and mongoose, these animals waged war against whatever had life, hunting fowls, etc., with the peculiarly stealthy gait so well known. I noticed now that a considerable number of my patients, and Persian acquaintances, and all the servants, were continually pestering me for quinine. The reason was that the high price of this drug, pure as I had it, was a temptation, and as each impostor got a small quantity, my store sensibly diminished. I was loath to stop distributing the drug altogether, as I had been particularly instructed that the giving away of quinine to the sick was beneficial, indirectly, to the good feeling which we desired to produce towards the English in Persia. However, I made a rule only to give away the drug _in solution_, or, in the case of servants of our own, in the dry state _in the mouth_. This had the desired effect, and as a rule one dose of the bitter drug caused the most grasping of the domestics to hesitate before applying for a second. This system I adopted during the whole time I was in the country, only giving the crystals to the European staff, and the quinine being distributed each year in ounces, where before it had been pounds. In fact, I did away with one of the sources of _legitimate_ (?) _modakel_ of the servants, who had traded on my innocence and simulated fever (intermittent) to obtain what was such very “portable property.”