The grape harvest was being gathered at Kasvin as we passed through. The place is well known for its extensive vineyards and fine fruit-gardens. Its golden grapes have a wide reputation, and these, with the white species, also grown there, are in steady demand for wine manufacture, which is carried on in the town, notwithstanding the greatly disproportionate number of Moullas among the inhabitants. Large quantities of the grapes are also sent to Tehran for wine purposes there. Persia keeps up the character for strong wine which it had 600 B.C., when the Scythian invaders took to it so eagerly as to establish the saying, 'As drunk as a Scythian.' It was said that these hard-headed, deep-drinking, wild warriors were always thirsting for 'another skinful,' and were ever ready to declare that the last was always the best. Eighteen hundred years later, Hafiz, the merry poet, sang aloud the praises of Shiraz wine, which to this day bears a high reputation in Persia, a reputation which was royally good in the traditional bygone time long before Cyrus, when it appears to have been highly appreciated in the festivities of Glorious Jamshed, the founder of Persepolis. The poet Omar Khayyam, in moralizing over the ruins of the fallen splendour of that famous place, speaks in Fitzgerald's 'Rubaiyat': 'They say the lion and the lizard keep The Court where Jamshed gloried and drank deep.' The Persian poet-historian Firdausi ascribes to Jamshed the discovery of wine in his leisure from kingly duties and scientific pursuits, for to him is attributed the invention of many useful arts, and the introduction of the solar year for measurement of time, the first day of which, when the sun enters Aries, he ordered to be celebrated by a splendid festival. It is called Nauroz, or New Year's Day, and is still the greatest festival in Persia. This single institution of former days, under a different religion and system of measuring time, has triumphed over the introduction of Mohammedanism, and is observed with as much joy and festivity now as it was by the ancient inhabitants of Persia.