He is a Sayyid of authentic descent, adorned with the excel­lence of learning and decked with the jewel of piety. His hand is drawn within the skirt of contentment, and he passes his time in instructing students, having his dwelling on the far side of the river at Agra, near to where the late Shaikh Bahā-'u-'d­dīn, the Muftī, used to live. Students and Ṣūfīs are gathered together in his hospice and profit by his companionship. He had one pupil, a one-eyed man named Maulānā Farīd, of whom it was said that, although* he had not studied deeply, as soon as a diffi­cult question or subtle and obscure argument was propounded to him from any advanced* book whatsoever, he would at once call for pen and inkstand, and, having reduced it to writing, would solve it immediately, although he could not give the solution orally, or even read what he had himself written. Shaikh Ẓiyā'u-'llāh* and the whole of the Ghauiyyah order submitted themselves entirely to the authority of this (Farīd), so that their subjection to the Sayyid may be imagined. I have also heard that the same Farīd would in one night relate to Sayyid Shāh Mīr events that had just happened in the farthest parts of the world, east or west. Some attributed this power to the possession of a jinn, and others to other causes. In the year in which the emperor summoned Shaikh Ẓiyā'u-'llāh from Āgra with great favour and kindness and assigned a place to him in the ‘Ibādat-khāna on an occasion when there was a gathering of the Shaikhs and ‘Ulamā, I one night in private questioned the Shaikh concerning the matter of Farīd the scribe, and, after relating what was spread abroad concerning him, I said, “Are these things really so?” The Shaikh first of all enumerated his own fragmentary writings and the works of which he was the author, detailed his own accomplishments and acquirements, and gave me a full account of himself, and then said, “In spite of all these favours which God (may His Majesty be exalted!) has bestowed upon me I cannot call myself so much us a gleaner (in the field of knowledge) after Shaikh Farīd, and all that you have heard of him does not amount to one hundredth part of the truth. His dignity is above it all, and he has attained this great good for­tune by means of sweeping the threshold of the holy Sayyid Shāh Mīr. Now I had seen Sayyid Shāh Mīr before this at Badāon, whither he had gone on business connected with his subsistence allowance. A copy of the Mashāriqu-'l-Anwār* was between us, and we had much learned discourse. He certainly had the medi­tative faculty strongly developed, a pleasant disposition, a ready understanding and a good stock of knowledge, but I did not find him such a prodigy as Shaikh Ẓiyā'u-'llāh and other men had represented. As for the rest, God the most High knows the truth. It may be that he purposely concealed his abilities from me, but indeed what need is there to suppose that he might not have displayed to others those abilities of the display of which* he allowed me to be disappointed?