I found one of our Armenian signallers in an engineer officer’s full-dress scarlet mess jacket, jack-boots, a full-dress uniform cap, lambswool drawers (sewn up in front) to simulate buckskins, a huge cavalry sabre, and _three_ revolvers. The fact was that he had assumed what he supposed to be the correct get-up of an English officer of rank, in order that if any highway robbers met him (the country was very disturbed at the time) on his seven days’ march to Abadeh, they might refrain from attacking him. He arrived safely. Unfortunately these assumptions of the appearance of the European by Armenians does not add to the respect which the real sahib receives. Some of the tales these people tell to increase their own importance in the eyes of their oppressors, the Persians, are ingenious and amusing. When I was living in Julfa, an Armenian village close to Ispahan, which had been for divers reasons made the headquarters of the Persian Telegraph Department in that place, I was called upon by a great personage, the farmer of the taxes, a Persian, one Rahim Khan. After the usual compliments, he remarked, in conversation, that “I must be very glad to live in so holy a place as Julfa. Full, too, of churches.” I demurred. “But amidst your co-religionists, men whom you so much revere.” This was too much. I told him that “we could not respect the Armenians, but that we pitied them for the many years of oppression they had undergone, which probably had brought out the bad points in their characters.” He would not be denied. “But you _revere_ them?” he persisted. “Quite the contrary.” He burst into a laugh. “Ah! dogs, and sons of dogs as they are,” he replied; “only the other day one of them told me, on my congratulating him on the presence of their protectors, the English—for you know, sahib, before the Feringhis came, _they were as are now the Jews_—that _they_ were not complimented, but rather the Europeans; for, said the dog, ‘we are to them what your Syuds (descendants of the prophet) are to you, noble sir’—in fact, holy men.” This anecdote is characteristic of the Armenian. The Hamadan Armenian is brighter and more civilised than his Ispahan _confrère_, his frequent journeyings to Russia having sharpened him, while, there being only two priests in the place, he is not bigoted. He has adopted the manners and dress of the Persian, also his language, and is so far less exposed to annoyance by the reigning people; in fact, in Hamadan he is not looked on or treated as an outcast; while in Julfa the national dress, specially apparent in the female attire, the national language, and their ignorance and lack of politeness, make them a people apart. The gist of the matter is, that in Hamadan and its environs, the Armenian is simply a Persian, not a Mahommedan; while in Julfa he is an Armenian of the Armenians; “and the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.”