hour in any spot, but upon the thirty-first minute he was to be shot. In one day he was out of our lands and far away. Now, I would not draw any comparison between yourself and that spy, for I am convinced of your _bona fides_; but Tahir Beg has suspected you, and has advised Lady Adela to keep a watch upon you. There is a feeling against you, and I warn you that the consideration would not be granted you that was accorded to the Russian, for you are but a Persian, and a bullet would settle all affairs simply and quickly. This morning Tahir Beg was for having you examined and shot; but I, knowing your excellence, and weeping inwardly for you, pleaded and gave my own guarantee that you were but what you professed to be, a perfectly innocuous person. Till at last I so prevailed that he relinquished the subject; but if you will take my advice you will not extend your stay. [Sidenote: THE RENEGADE’S TALE] “Ah, sir, you know the old German proverb, ‘The mountain looks fine from afar, but how disappointing when under it.’ Such is but too true of this place. From afar, where the traveller talks of the hospitality of Lady Adela, the great houses, the gardens, the bazaar of Halabja, he forgets the savageness, the incredible treachery and insecurity which makes life here a tremulous fear. Ah, these people, they but seek to squeeze out of a man what he has, and then kill him. Think not that they will give you anything here, nor treat you kindly except you pay for it tenfold. Take my advice, my friend, flee from this nest of scorpions before yet they sting you to death, quit this town of hungry vultures while the flesh remains upon your bones and before it grows on theirs. Look at me, what do I possess? I walk about in these wretched clothes seeking only to protect even them from the rapacious appetite of some predatory Kurd.” “Yet,” I said, “it seems to me that since the day you arrived from Bagdad, a fugitive, possessing less even than this, you were worse off then than now, when by the Pasha’s beneficence you possess house, clothes, wife, children, and the wherewithal to keep them all.” “Ah, you do not understand,” he protested feebly, and was silent for a while. Then once again he took up his tale of alarm and warning, but I had had enough, and to get rid of him began to ridicule him for a European turned Musulman, and to ask him where the sect of the Sunnis was a whit better than us of the Shi’a--questions he funked--and departed. It had not sufficed to alarm me, all this rigmarole, but I was made aware of the existence of a mean and cowardly enemy at Halabja, whose favourite weapon was obviously slander. Fortunately this was that Kurdistan where it is the habit to shout one’s affairs upon the house-tops and bill-sides, and slander has a short life, usually terminated by an unexpected bullet.