This episode was told us, as it happened, on the day after the query why some animals were very hard to kill; when we had explained that roughly, the lower the animal in the scale of creation, the more cutting and hacking he would stand. Hearing of the Kurd's adventures, the Patriarch looked across at us and observed drily, "I always thought that Kurds were precious low animals, Rabbi, and now I know it." On the same occasion, a visitor detailed his own experience, when he had gone to pay a visit of sympathy to a Kurdish neighbour, who had recently lost some near relative. He entered the house, and found all the family as he had expected, seated wailing round the fireplace, as proper Kurdish custom dictates. They will sit thus, literally in the ashes, for some days; keeping up a low keening continuously, though at times some one of the party, without the least warning, will spring to his feet and shriek. Any visitor who wishes to express sympathy, takes up a shovelful of ashes from the hearth and pours it on the heads of the whole circle. The Christian, of course, did not neglect this act of courtesy, but performed it liberally. However, quite unintentionally, he took up some live coals in the shovel, and these, by ill-luck, went down the neck of one of the mourners, who at once sprang to his feet with a howl, exclaiming "I burn, I burn," and began tearing his clothes off. This, however, was quite ordinary behaviour, for wailing and rending of garments are habitual on these occasions; so all the family simply sat still and wailed in sympathy. The unlucky lad was really painfully, though not dangerously, burnt before his friends could be brought to understand that his sufferings were physical rather than mental! As the recognized head of the Christian "_ashirets_" of Tyari and Tkhuma, and as the present holder of what all Mussulmans of the district recognize as a most ancient and venerable throne, Mar Shimun has a high position among the Kurds personally; though that fact does not, of course, keep them from plundering his people. In the past, indeed, it has not always availed to protect the House of the Patriarch itself from outrage; for when Bedr Khan Beg, the formidable Mira of Bohtan, attacked these Christian tribes in 1845--and perpetrated a massacre so appalling that the years are dated from it to this day--a special attempt was made to "extirpate the head of this brood of serpents."