The penalties for the violation of the Persian law were very severe, and human life was considered of very little value, capital punishment being inflicted even for the killing of a dog. Their laws were far more barbarous than those of England in Sir William Blackstone’s time, when one hundred and sixty offenses[195] were declared by act of Parliament to be worthy of instant death;[196] and death was the most humane of the Persian punishments, when it was promptly inflicted, for their methods were too terrible for description. Two hundred stripes were awarded if one tilled land in which a corpse had been buried within a year, or if the mother of a very young child drank water. Four hundred stripes were the penalty if one covered with a cloth a dead man’s feet, and eight hundred if he covered the whole body. The penalty for killing a puppy was five hundred stripes, six hundred for killing a stray dog, eight hundred for a shepherd’s dog, and ten thousand stripes for killing a water-dog.[197] In the old Āryan legislation there were many crimes which were considered more criminal than murder, and Persians who defiled the earth were not more severely punished than were the Greeks who defiled the ground of Delos, nor would the Athenians, who put Atarbes to death, have wondered at the awful punishment inflicted for the killing of the Persian water-dog. There are but few laws in the Vendīdad, however absurd, that may not find a counterpart in the legislation of the Greeks or Latins. Every crime, according to the Persian law, makes the guilty man[198] liable to two penalties, one here on earth and another in the next world, but in ancient Persia, as in modern legislation, there was a money value attached to many crimes, and the rich criminal escaped by paying his fine, so far as this present world was concerned. In the next, however, his money is of no value to him; when he comes to the head of Chinvat bridge, his conscience becomes a maiden, either of divine beauty, or of fiendish deformity, according to his merits. The bridge itself, which reaches over the awful chasm of hell to the heavenly shore on the other side, widens, if he be a good man, to the width of nine javelins; but for the souls of the wicked it narrows to a thread and they fall down into hell. THE PLACE OF REWARD. “O, Maker of the material world! where are the rewards given? where does the rewarding take place?”