The country where Tirāhī is spoken belongs to that border region between India and Eastern Irān which since my youth has never ceased to attract me by its varied historical, geographical, and linguistic interest. So when after my first Central-Asian expedition my hope of being employed in the newly constituted North-West Frontier Province was realized, I was anxious to use whatever chance might offer for securing materials concerning that old language of Tirāh, to the supposed survival of which Sir George Grierson had first called my attention. The inquiries I made with this object during 1904–5 both from the side of Peshāwar and from that of Kohāt and the Kurram valley proved, however, fruitless. The Political Agents of the Khyber and Kurram, whom their duties as Wardens of the Marches keep in close contact with the tribes occupying the valleys of Tirāh and the tracts of Afghānistān adjoining towards the Kābul river, uniformly asserted that their local informants knew of no other language but Paṣḥtō being spoken between the Kurram and Kābul rivers. Other Frontier Officers to whom I applied were equally unable to help. It seemed, indeed, as if that Tirāhī speech, of which Leech in 1838 had heard as a “ relict ” preserved by a small tribal community outside its original home, and had collected a very brief vocabulary, had since become completely submerged by the steadily spreading tide of Paṣḥtō. Nor did I fare better in 1912, when archæological work brought me back for some months to the Peshāwar border before my third Central-Asian expedition.