A Jew readily acceded to the proposal that he and two labourers should be paid for their time, and a few kerans should be given by us for permission to dig, and the intrinsic value of any object in the precious metals handed over to him, the objects themselves being ours. A few days after, the Jew came to show us the place, some miles from the town where the search was taking place. Two labourers dug some foot of the surface earth away in clods and piled it in heaps. The Jew watched the labourers, and we watched the Jew. After they had uncovered the whole of the ten yards square, which it was agreed that we should dig, the labourers set to to sift it through a coarse sieve, but nothing was found; a second sifting, however, which we noticed that the Jew watched with much more curiosity than the first, produced four small cubes of gold; they were about one-third of an inch cube, and were composed of tiny beads of pure gold soldered together, a hole being left in two of the opposite sides for stringing; they were hollow, and about two pounds in value (the four). We found only these, and they were too few to form an ornament, though doubtless real relics of ancient Ecbatana. So we rewarded our Jew, and dug no more for hidden treasure, or rather antiquities. I frequently laugh at our housekeeping experiences in those early days. We paid our cook ten kerans a day each for our messing, but every little extra was debited to us with stern accuracy; as, one day we made a pound of toffee, and at the month’s end were charged, “For making the Feringhi sweetmeat, fifteen shillings!” These items and the pay of my servants and my horse-keep made me fear that I should not be able to live on my pay; but I soon found that the cook was simply charging us four times the cost of our living. As Pierson was now leaving for Teheran, I was able to manage with a humbler cook on a less extravagant scale, and live better. An amusing instance of the inveterate habit of making modakel now occurred prior to Pierson’s departure. In the early days of the Telegraph Department in Persia the line was supported by _wooden_ poles, generally poplar, and much trouble was found in buying these. It would have been impossible for a European to buy them at all, and as the natives had to be employed, it taxed all Pierson’s ingenuity to prevent wholesale robbery taking place. The poles had to be paid for, and the buyer and seller generally managed to put their heads together to make the “Dowlet Ingleez” (English Government) pay a very fancy price.