Let me now attempt to portray in the following slight sketch the external mode of living in Bokhara. In the morning--I mean by the term before sunrise, as by religious compulsion every man is an early riser--one encounters people, half-asleep, and half-awake, and half-dressed, hurrying one by one to the mosques: any delay in arriving not only entails reproach, but is considered as meriting punishment. The stir made by these devotees in running through the streets rouses the houseless dogs from their lairs in the out-of-the-way corners or upon the heaps of dung. These famished, horrid-looking animals--yet contrasted with their Stambouli brethren, presenting a princely appearance--are crying proofs of the miserly nature of the Bokhariots. The poor creatures first struggle to rear their gaunt frames, mere skin and bone, from sleep; then they rub their rough, hairless carcases, against the mouldering walls, and this toilette at an end, they start upon their hunt for a _dejeûner à la fourchette_, for the most part made up of a few fleshless bones or carrion, but very often of kicks in the ribs administered by some compassionating and charitable inhabitant of Bokhara. At the same time as the dogs, awake the hardly-better lodged Parias of the Tartar capital--I mean the wretched men afflicted with incurable and contagious skin diseases, who sit at the corners of the streets _en famille_, and house in miserable tents. In Persia they are met with, remote from cities and villages, on the high roads; but here, owing to the absence of sanitary regulations, they are tolerated in the middle of the city. Their lot is far the most terrible to which any son of earth can have to submit, and unhappily they are long livers too. Whilst the mother is clothing her other accursed offspring with a scanty covering of rags, the father seats himself with the most disfigured one amongst them by the roadside, in order to solicit charity and alms from those who pass. Charity and alms to prolong such an existence!