When I was stopping at the Mihman khana, I came in late one night, having been for several hours with the Amir, and while walking up to the house from the gate, I noticed one of the syces (grooms) coming from the house towards me, and making a prodigious noise, whistling. He stopped whistling when he saw me, and I wondered why he was so noisy, such being unusual, but when I got to my rooms I found the reason to be a nervous shock he had had. It appeared that one of my Hindustani servants, while in a facetious mood, had blacked his face, or rather made it more black with burnt cork, and whitened his lips and made white circles round his eyes. Then, taking two sheepskin coats, he had reversed them so that the hair was outside, and putting his legs through the sleeves of one and his arms through the sleeves of the other, had fastened both round his waist, and then put on a sheepskin cap with long hair. He dressed up afterwards to show me, and his appearance was not prepossessing. A guard of seven men was stationed in the vestibule outside the door of my rooms, and to these he came on hands and knees until quite close, and then he started bounding towards them with huge roars. Thinking that a real deoo (demon) was on them, every man flung away rifle and sheepskin coat, which is a heavy one, and fled wildly to the guard-room at the outer gate; but one man, who was asleep when the rest fled, woke up with the noise and rose to a sitting position, staring round-eyed at the apparition and booing, until he regained enough consciousness to get up and fly. The demon then went to the small room adjoining the verandah, where the chaeedar’s quarters were (the man who makes the tea). The chaeedar was sitting alone in deep thought, on a small carpet with his back to the window, which was open, but when this apparition came through the door, he rose up and sprang backwards through the window, regardless of possible injury to himself or anything else, save that he left the room immediately. The next people visited were those of the Amir’s servants, who were appointed to look after my comforts, and were always in my sitting-room when on duty, and his appearance at one door was the signal for their wild flight through the other, chairs and tables being upset in the hurry to get out. He then visited the other servants in their quarters with great success, and it was soon after it was over, and all had gathered together again to relate their impressions and experience, that I came in and the tale was told to me. All those who had been frightened looked very sheepish, and each man was trying to prove that he ran because the other one did. However, the infection of fear spread even to the apparition, and for several nights after no one would go out, not even across the garden to their own quarters, unless some one was with them.