The British Government has had a piece of good fortune
in Asia. Ayoub Khan, after months of what must have been most romantic adventure, has voluntarily surrendered himself to the British Agent at Meshed, in Persia. He appears to have been baffled in every attempt to enter
Afghanistan, the Ameer's representatives on the frontier doing their duty with an energy quickened by their knowledge that Abdurrahman Khan never forgives personal treason. Ayoub will now be interned in British India, where gaolers are not to be bribed, and where he will be valuable, in case of necessity, as a check upon his cousin, who will probably now stamp out the relics of rebellion. There is no popular pretender left, and the clan chiefs are far too jealous of one another to support any candidate not of the great Dourness line. The Ameer is left alone, and if he can keep his hands from plunder till his son is old enough to command, may leave him master of Afghanistan in a sense which that land of hereditary rebels has never before known_ Even Dust Mahommed, though he slaughtered the disobedient without remorse, never claimed to be autocrat as his saturnine descendant does. The latter realises his claim, too, as nearly as man may in a land to which the Scotland of the early Stuarts is the closest possible analogue.
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