There are few better instances of the long survival of a traditional sentiment than the fact of the king’s (or the chief’s) stable being regarded in modern Persia as an inviolable sanctuary. This must have originated in the veneration once felt for the horse. The misfortunes which befell the grandson of Nadir Shah were attributed to his having put to death a man who took refuge in his stable. No horse will carry to victory a master who profanes his stable with bloodshed. Even political offenders or pretenders to the throne were safe if they could reach the stable for as long as they remained in it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XV ANIMALS IN EASTERN FICTION I WAS looking idly at the motley Damascus crowd behind whose outward strangeness to my eyes I knew there lay a deeper strangeness of ideas, when in the middle of a clearing I saw a monkey in a red fez which began to go through its familiar tricks. I thought to myself, “How very near that monkey seems to me!” It was like the well-known figure of an old friend. So it is with the animal-lore of Eastern fiction; it seems very near to us; its heroes are our familiar friends. Perhaps we would lose everything in the treasure-house of Oriental tales sooner than the stories of beasts. If those stories had a hidden meaning which escapes us we are not troubled by their hidden meaning. In their obvious sense they appeal to us directly, without any effort to call up conditions of life and mind far removed from our own. We take them to our hearts and keep them there.