sky, by the children's voices
intoning. And I have put aside my curtain and looked out from my
rest-house and seen them in the dim starlight kneeling before the
pagoda, the tomb of the great teacher, saying his laws. The light comes
rapidly in this country: the sky reddens, the stars die quickly
overhead, the first long beams of sunrise are trembling on the dewy
bamboo feathers ere they have finished. It is one of the most beautiful
sights imaginable to see monks and children kneeling on the bare ground,
singing while the dawn comes.

The education in their religion is very good, very thorough, not only in
precept, but in practice; for in the monastery you must live a holy
life, as the monks live, even if you are but a schoolboy.

But the secular education is limited. It is up to the standard of
education amongst the people at large, but that is saying little. Beyond
reading and writing and arithmetic it generally does not go. I have seen
the little boys do arithmetic. They were adding sums, and they began,
not as we would, on the right, but on the left. They added, say, the
hundreds first; then they wrote on the slate the number of hundreds, and
added up the tens. If it happened that the tens mounted up so as to add
one or more to the hundreds, a grimy little finger would wipe out the
hundreds already written and write in the correct numbers. It follows
that if the units on being added up came to over ten, the tens must be
corrected with the grimy little finger, first put in the mouth. Perhaps
both tens and hundreds had to be written again. It will be seen that
when you come to thousands and tens of thousands, a good deal of wiping
out and re-writing may be required. A Burman is very bad at arithmetic;
a villager will often write 133 as 100,303; he would almost as soon
write 43 as 34; both figures are in each number, you see.

I never met a Burman who had any idea of cubic measurement, though land
measurement they pick up very quickly.

I have said that the education in the monasteries is up to the average
education of the people. That is so. Whether when civilization
progresses and more education is required the monasteries will be able
to provide it is another thing.

The education given now is mostly a means to an end: to learning the
precepts of religion. Whether the monks will provide an education beyond
such a want, I doubt. A monk is by his vows, by the whole tenour of his
life, apart from the world; too ke