Anyone who has had experience of the vagaries of Turkish Customs House officials can sympathize with people whose goods fell into their hands. The smallest irregularity, however unintentional, detected in a declaration or manifest could only be set right by the liberal distribution of bribes. Woe betide the scrupulous owner or consignee who declined to adopt such methods and decided instead to stand by his rights and carry his complaint to higher authorities. The story is told of a young missionary lady whose wedding outfit was packed into a box which was taken in custody by a Turkish official and was detained for the ostensible purpose of examination of the contents and assessment of duty. The settlement of this knotty point proceeded in a leisurely fashion for weeks, because the owner's conscience or purse would not permit of her speedily clinching the matter by a suitable payment. When the box was finally delivered the addressee found, to her horror, that the wedding dress and other articles of her trousseau bore unmistakable traces of having been worn. To add insult to injury, the Customs authorities threatened to confiscate the goods, saying that there was a prohibition against the importation of "worn clothes"! There is no doubt that they had been freely used by the harem of some Ottoman Customs official, as the curiosity of Turkish ladies regarding the latest European fashions was notorious and could usually overcome official scruples. When the Inland Insurance system was introduced in India in 1877 it was extended to the post offices in the Persian Gulf and Turkish Arabia. The Insured Parcel Post was used largely by traders at Bagdad, Basra and Bushire for the exportation of specie, and the total value insured in 1882-83 amounted to over twenty-four lakhs of rupees. The pearl merchants at Bahrain, which is the centre of the pearl fisheries in the Gulf, availed themselves largely of the Insured Parcels Post for the export of valuable parcels of pearls. Protests were soon lodged by the British India Steam Navigation Company, which held the mail contract, against this competition on the part of the Post Office on the ground that it infringed their monopoly. They argued that the carriage of specie and pearls was almost the sole source of profit from the Persian Gulf service, and after a careful review of the whole question it was decided in 1885 to abolish insurance of parcels and letters to and from the British post offices in the Gulf and Turkish Arabia. This measure resulted in a heavy loss in postal revenue, but was only fair to a Company which had risked much in maintaining British trade relations with that part of the world, and which has done more than any other to throttle German competition.