And this Tahir Pasha did, to the limits of his not very extensive power. He had no great belief in Reform, or for that matter in anything else (except the straightness of certain English gentlemen whom he knew, and in the genius of his favourite hero, Admiral Nelson): and he held shrewdly that "you cannot build very high, when your bricks are made of wet mud"--and of Mosul slime at that he might have added, though he did not say so in words. Still, under his rule nobody's lot was intolerable if it was impossible for anybody to be really comfortable; and he had absolutely nothing to learn in the art of keeping a simmering province from boiling over, when the Government had no force to back its orders, and did not wish to have any open row. He was an elderly man, tall and portly; with a "short" face, framed in a close-cropped, white beard, and a shrewd and humorous expression. Nature had given him a most attractive manner; and by virtue of it he had survived two revolutions in the country, being the only man of his rank to do so. When things went amiss, "he sat on the stile and continued to smile," and almost always found that the method softened the heart of the most furious of cows. Further, he was singularly cleanhanded, as Ottoman officials go. Even those who declared that he took bribes in his youth admitted that he refused them in his old age--"unless they were very big," they added. Well, for the bribes, what is an official to do, whose salary, is in the first place, wholly inadequate; and in the second, not paid? When he did not need them, he ceased to take them. "How otherwise? I liked him, I confess," as Browning put it, of a character that much resembled the old Albanian; whose name (by the way) is, being interpreted, "Innocent," and who had the reputation throughout his province of never sending a petitioner away dissatisfied, and yet of never making a promise that it was inconvenient to keep.