the wolves ate my poor boy.  I heard this from travellers, and went and gathered up his bones and buried them in the shrine.  I did not quite recover till the third day, when I found that some washerwomen had put me into the pool, and left me there with my head out, in hopes that this would revive me; but they had no hope of my son.  I was then taken to the police of the town; but the landholders had begged me to say nothing about the poisoners, lest it might get them and their village community into trouble.  The man was tall and fair, and about thirty-five; the woman short, stout, and fair, and about thirty; two of her teeth projected a good deal; the boy’s eyelids were much diseased.’

All this he told me without the slightest appearance of emotion, for he had not seen any appearance of it in me, or my Persian writer; and a casual European observer would perhaps have exclaimed, ’What brutes these natives are!  This fellow feels no more for the loss of his only son than he would for that of a goat’.  But I knew the feeling was there.  The Persian writer put up his paper, and closed his inkstand, and the following dialogue, word for word, took place between me and the old man: 

Question.—­What made you conceal the real cause of your boy’s death, and tell the police that he had been killed, as well as eaten, by wolves?

Answer.—­The landholders told me that they could never bring back my boy to life, and the whole village would be worried to death by them if I made any mention of the poison.

Question.—­And if they were to be punished for this they would annoy you?

Answer.—­Certainly.  But I believed they advised me for my own good as well as their own.

Question.—­And if they should turn you away from that place, could you not make another?

Answer.-Are not the bones of my poor boy there, and the trees that he and I planted and watched together for ten years?

Question.-Have you no other relations?  What became of your boy’s mother?

Answer.-She died at that place when my boy was only three months old.  I have brought him up myself from that age; he was my only child, and he has been poisoned for the sake of the blanket! (Here the poor old man sobbed as if his heartstrings would break; and I was obliged to make him sit down on the floor while I walked up and down the room.)

Question.—­Had you any children before?

Answer.—­Yes, sir, we had several, but they all died before their mother.  We had been reduced to beggary by misfortunes, and I had become too weak and ill to work.  I buried my poor wife’s bones by the side of the road where she died; raised the little shrine over them, planted the trees, and there have I sat ever since by her side, with our poor boy in my bosom.  It is a sad place for wolves, and we used often to hear them howling outside; but my poor boy was never afraid of them