days before, had bounded with delight and joy to meet his own; and he turned away his head with a shudder. When the operation was completed, the mummy was laid out upon a board, and placed under a tent in the garden, in order to be still further desiccated by the action of the air. Here it remained seven days and nights, and the walls being low, it was necessary to keep a strict and perpetual watch over it, lest the hyenas should enter and devour it. Worn down as he was by fever, by watching, and by sorrow, Pietro would intrust this sacred duty to no vulgar guardian during the night, but, with his loaded musket in his hand, paced to and fro before the tent through the darkness, while the howls of the hyenas, bursting forth suddenly quite near him, as it were, frequently startled his ear and increased his vigilance. By day he took a few hours’ repose, while his domestics kept watch. When this melancholy task had been duly performed, he departed, in sickness and dejection, for the city of Lâr, where the air being somewhat cooler and more pure, he entertained some hopes of a recovery. Not many days after his arrival, a Syrian whom he had known at Ispahan brought him news from Bagdad which were any thing but calculated to cheer or console his mind. He learned that another sister of Maani had died on the road in returning from Persia; that the father, stricken to the soul by this new calamity, had likewise died a few days after reaching home; and that the widow, thus bereaved of the better part of her family, and feeling the decrepitude of old age coming apace, was inconsolable. Our traveller was thunderstruck. Death seemed to have put his mark on all those whom he loved. Persia now became hateful to him. Its very atmosphere appeared to teem with misfortunes as with clouds. Nothing, therefore, seemed left him but to quit it with all possible celerity. Pietro’s desire to return to Italy was now abated, and travelling more desirable than home; motion, the presence of strange objects, the surmounting of difficulties and dangers, being better adapted than ease and leisure for the dissipating of sharp grief. For this reason he returned to the shore of the Persian Gulf, and embarked at Gombroon on board of an English ship for India, taking along with him the body of his wife, and a little orphan Georgian girl whom he and Maani had adopted at Ispahan. As even a father cannot remove his daughter, or a husband his wife, from the shah’s dominions without an especial permission, which might not be granted without considerable delay, Pietro determined to elude the laws, and disguising the Georgian in the dress of a boy, contrived to get her on board among the ship’s crew in the dusk of the evening, on the 19th of January, 1623.