The Afghans are not great travellers, for their rulers do not offer facilities for them to visit other lands, nor do they encourage strangers in the country. They prefer instead to keep the people isolated, and out of touch with the rest of the world, and are fearful that knowledge and enlightenment would lessen their hold on their subjects, who would be less easily swayed in the direction they wished when invoked in the name of their religion were they conversant with the laws and customs of the people of other countries, and could thereby draw comparisons for themselves. In Western Australia, however, is a small community of Afghans who had been many years in the colony, and do a trade in camel transport across the sandy desert tracts there. One of these returned to Afghanistan a few years ago, bringing with him his English, or rather Australian, wife who had embraced his own religion. She was uneducated, and could not read or write, and from what she said about the visions she had, and voices she heard exhorting her to persevere in the practice of her new religion, one would imagine that her mind was rather unhinged. The man had returned to his own country, wishing to see it again after thirty years’ absence and to be buried in the land of his fathers, and he brought back a small fortune with him; but his relations in Kandahar had borrowed so much and so frequently that he had but little left, and for this reason he had to leave his own place and come to Kabul to see what the Amir would do for him. He lived in a very small house with but one servant, and his wife was allowed a small sum yearly from the Government, and that was all they had to live on. He was very grateful to me for the pipe and occasional presents of tobacco I gave him, and often lamented his want of sense in leaving Australia, where he had all that made life pleasant, but to which he was unable to return. He spoke English like an Australian, and his language was interlarded with oaths which sounded queerly from the lips of a typical Afghan. He died some two years after his return from heart disease; and the cholera, which broke out a few weeks later, carried off his wife amongst other victims, and before she died, one of his nephews was doing all he could to get her to marry him that he might share in her pension.