Authority, though most unwilling, was prodded into some sort of activity, and that particular gang was arrested and stowed in gaol. The robberies, however, did not diminish a whit; and after a while the governor of the prison pointed out this fact to the Vali. Evidently "those poor men" had been wrongly arrested after all, and ought in fairness to be released--seeing that they had never been tried. This seemed reasonable, but there was the usual delay before doing anything, and in those few days the true explanation came to light. The honourable the governor of the prison was in the habit of letting the gang in question out of the gaol every night, "to go and sleep at their own houses." They returned again before dawn, thus getting the most satisfactory alibi any man could desire; while, in consideration of his complacency, the governor was taking half their plunder! It is true that this official was dismissed from his post in consequence, but apparently he received no further penalty of any sort. This may, perhaps, sound a "tough yarn"; yet we may find a fairly recent parallel for it in England. The memoirs of William Hickey record an even worse scandal of one of the London bailiffs in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Our boasted superiority to this sort of thing is of very recent date, and perhaps will not be of very long duration. The Governor-General or Vali, who ruled this city of confusion and corruption, was perhaps as good a man as could have been selected for a job where his powerlessness to effect any real improvement would have broken the heart of anyone who still had any enthusiasms or delusions left. Tahir Pasha was an Albanian by blood, though he had grown grey in the Sultan's service, and had certainly never seen his own mountains since boyhood. Still, "once an Arnaut, always an Arnaut," and, as a general rule, men of that very striking race are the best possible Ottoman officials; particularly in places where their duty is (or is supposed to be) the preservation of an even balance between the various Christian and Mussulman races. It is impossible for an Arnaut to despise all Christians just because of their religion; for a large proportion of his own race are of that creed, and it is an axiom that every Arnaut is congenitally superior to every other specimen of manhood. That being so, he may despise all his subjects equally (and very probably does so), but at least he does not despise any one set specially, and there is always a chance of his doing some justice among them.