Some poles were suddenly very urgently required, and the Sarhang or Colonel, the chief of the officials of the Persian office of the telegraph in Hamadan, the moonshee[12] or interpreter, a member of our staff, a native of Baghdad, and Pierson’s head-servant or nazir, were sent together to buy poles to the tune of kerans two thousand four hundred, in the villages in the neighbourhood, on the principle that each would act as a check on the other. These gentry divided their money into two portions, half to be profit and half to buy poles. The poles were purchased; but when they returned, the moonshee desired an interview with Pierson. After pointing out his own integrity and high sense of honour (this man’s English was peculiar; it had been acquired of the sailors in Baghdad, and was freely interlarded with oaths; but, worst of all, he had never learnt the use of the words _very_, _more_, and _most_, substituting the more homely expression which is used by Anglo-Saxons for sanguinary, as a word meaning all three; his conversation was thus less choice than forcible), he communicated to Pierson that half of the sum said to be expended had been set aside as plunder, but that _he_ was no party to such arrangement. When I heard of the matter I set it down to disinterested virtue, but Pierson, whose experience of the Oriental was larger than mine, determined to sift the matter. Hardly had the moonshee retired than the nazir requested a private interview, and stated that he too felt impelled by virtuous indignation to discover to his master the wicked conspiracy of the Colonel and the moonshee, who had agreed to divide the hundred and twenty tomans illicitly gained into three shares, making forty for each; but that the Colonel suggested to him that it would be better to give the moonshee nothing, which would leave them, the sarhang and himself, sixty each. “Of course, I report the affair to the sahib, and he will use his discretion,” he said. The next morning Pierson sent for the Colonel, who denied the whole matter, produced receipts duly sealed for the payment of the whole two thousand four hundred kerans, and indignantly protested his honesty: “Comme officier Persan—décoré par sa Majesté!” (he spoke French fluently.) On an inquiry being instituted, it came out that the original idea was, as the moonshee said, to divide the plunder into three shares. Then, as the nazir said, into two—hence the honesty of the moonshee; and at last the Colonel resolved to keep the whole himself, which accounted for the virtue of the nazir. The money was disgorged, and the chief of the Persian Telegraph in Teheran fined his subordinate in Hamadan forty pounds, or one hundred tomans. So there is not always, in Persia at least, “Honour among thieves.”