of the new administration. Within a few weeks, the taxes were again commencing to flow in; not, of course, with the methodical regularity as during the life-time of the old Ameer and the stewardship of Hajji Akhbar Khan, but sufficiently smoothly to keep the country out of bankruptcy; and in this, as in the other administrative departments, it was the primitive simplicity of Tamerlanistan which permitted Hector to accomplish in a few weeks what, in a more hectic, a more highly organized, a more complicated European country, would have taken him as many months or years.
Next he turned his attention to the household, the palace. Many of the customs there went against his grain. But he said to himself that the Orient is the Orient, and that the harem, the intimacy of the house and family, is absolutely inviolable. Nor did he fancy himself in the rôle of a reformer. He was tolerant enough to admit that that which is right in London may well be wrong in Pekin, and vice versa, and so he attempted no changes in the household, with the single exception that he did away with the multitude of spies, telling tales about each other. Otherwise he left the intimate palace affairs in the hands of the old nurse.
When it came to the reform of the army, he not only used the military lessons he had learned in the Dragoons and at war college, but also the sober psychological wisdom—though he himself referred to it as horse sense—he had acquired through his human relations with the troopers in his half-squadron.
He remembered chiefly the case, including the
