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It was interesting to come from the street and the crowds of Parsis and natives all so slenderly built and watch the British youth in shirt sleeves and thin tweeds playing billiards they were not above the average physique of their class, mostly young fellows who had already been through campaigns and you noted the muscles showing through their thin clothes and compared them with native figures, and it did not seem surprising that one of them could keep in order quite a number of such wisps as the billiard markers for example.

Nor were the Jews and the Parsis who had been newly converted to the Faith, and were living, the former in Hamadán, and the latter in Yazd, immune to the assaults of enemies whose fury was exasperated by the evidences of the penetration of the light of the Faith in quarters they had fondly imagined to be beyond its reach.

There they throve and there they live still, while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning and dwindling away. As the Parsis are the ruins of a people, so are their sacred books the ruins of a religion. There has been no other great belief in the world that ever left such poor and meagre monuments of its past splendor.

They were allowed to adhere to their religion, provided they helped with their taxes to fill the Moslim exchequer. This rule was even extended to such religions as that of the Parsis, although they could not be considered as belonging to the "People of Scripture" expressly recognized in the Qoran.

Silly ignorant Goslings in the middle saying to Brahmins, 'And you are Muscleman, aren't you, or are you a Dhobi? and to Parsis, 'I suppose you High Caste gentlemen have to bathe every day? shoving their awful ignorance under the noses of everybody, and inquiring after the healths of the 'chief wives'. Silly fatuous geese! and then talking the wildest piffle about the 'burning question of the hour' and making the seditious rotters groan at their ineptitude and folly, until they cheer them up sudden-like with a bit of dam' treason and sedition they ought to be jailed for.

Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against the same mistrust and ill-will which had disheartened Fraser; but he came out of it victorious, and prevailed at last on the Parsis to part both with their books and their knowledge.

In India there were several elements such as the Parsis and the Hindu "banyas," or money-lenders, whose previous activities in commerce or usury predisposed them to financial and industrial activity in the modern sense.

He has been called a Zoroastrian, because he recognised in the sun the sign of the presence of the Almighty. And there can be no doubt but that the simplicity of the system of the Pársís had a great attraction for him. In his own scheme there was no priesthood.

I suppose they and the Bengalis are the backbone of Indian mercantile business. Yet in "India," by Sir Thomas Holdich, I read that out of the population of 287,000,000 the Parsis do not number even one-tenth of a million. It seems to me that we have the Parsi woman's type at home in some of our old families, as we have remains of their Zoroastrian fire-worship.

There was not one Englishman who was a genuine volunteer and not half a dozen Parsis. Englishmen prefer to join a corps which consists of Englishmen or at least has an English Company. When they have no opportunity of so doing, it is a little unfair to class them with the lazy, unpatriotic, degenerate young gentlemen who have the opportunity and do not seize it.