provinces, and finally king of a mighty realm. He had soul enough,
according to Carlyle's idea, not to need salt; but, for all that, the
salt saved him.

Another king of Persia, Khurreem Khan, was not ashamed to admit, with a
crown on his head, that he had once been a thief, and was wont to
recount of himself what in these days we should call a case of
conscience. Thus he told it:--

"When I was a poor soldier in Nadir Shah's camp, my necessities led me
to take from a shop a gold-embossed saddle, sent thither by an Afghan
chief to be repaired. I soon afterward heard that the owner of the shop
was in prison, sentenced to be hanged. My conscience smote me. I
restored the stolen article to the very place whence I had removed it,
and watched till it was discovered by the tradesman's wife. She uttered
a scream of joy, on seeing it, and fell on her knees, invoking
blessings on the person who had brought it back, and praying that he
might live to have a hundred such saddles. I am quite certain that the
honest prayer of the old woman aided my fortune in attaining the
splendor she wished me to enjoy."

These are variations upon the general theme of thievery. They all tend
to show that it is, at the least, unsafe to take the fact of a man's
having committed a certain crime against property as a proof _per se_
that he is radically bad or inferior in intellect. "Your thief looks
in the crowd," says Byron,

"Exactly like the rest, or rather better,"--

and this, not because physiognomy is false, but the thief's face true.