A common mayor who has not the authority to behead, may kill criminals by fastening them to the mouth of a cannon and sending a ball through the body. Another method is to bury the condemned alive in a cask filled with cement, leaving only the head exposed. The cement soon hardens and the victim dies. Sometimes when their crime is not very bad the punishment is the severing of one hand from the body. If the man thus punished should commit a second crime the remaining hand would be severed. If a Mohammedan becomes drunk with wine and gets loud and abusive, he is arrested, and the executioner punctures the partition skin between the nostrils of the drunken man, and a cord of twine, several feet long, is passed through the opening. Then the executioner starts down the street leading his victim. The man soon gets sober and is very much ashamed. Shopkeepers give the executioner pennies as he passes along the street. Men who quarrel and fight are punished by tying their feet to a post, with the bare soles upward, and then whipping the feet until the flesh is bruised and bleeding and, frequently, the nails torn from the toes. The victims frequently become insensible under this punishment. One good thing in the laws of punishment is that no Christians or Jews are ever beheaded. The Mohammedans consider the Christian and Jew as being unclean, and think it would be a mean thing to behead them. Princes, lords and counts are never beheaded. The most severe punishment for a prince is to pluck out his eyes. The method of execution for counts and lords is of two kinds. The king will send a bottle of Sharbat to the condemned man which is given him in the form of a sweet drink but it contains a deadly poison. He is compelled to drink this and soon dies. Another form is for the condemned man to be met by a servant from the governor after having taken a bath and the servant cuts blood-vessels in the arm of the condemned until death results from loss of blood. Thus it will be seen that the contrast in modes of punishment in a Christian nation and a Mohammedan nation is very great. The kind of punishment inflicted on criminals in any country grows out of the prevailing religious belief of that country. A religion that has much cruelty in it will lead a people to torture its criminals. But a nation whose religion is based upon love will deal with its criminals effectively, but as kindly as possible. The writer has visited prisons in both Persia and America and finds that the contrast between the prisons of the two countries is like the contrast of a palace and a cellar. Prisoners in America ought to be very thankful for the humane treatment they receive under this Christian government. CHAPTER III. COUNTS OR LORDS.