d, a laughter in the
sunshine, a flush of blossom along the fields like the awakening of a
new joy. The rains are gone and the cool weather is coming; Lent is
over and gladness is returned; the crop has been sown, and soon will
come the reaping. And so at this full moon of October is the great feast
of the year. There are other festivals: of the New Year, in March, with
its water-throwing; of each great pagoda at its appointed time; but of
all, the festival at the end of Lent is the greatest.

Wherever there are great pagodas the people will come in from far and
near for the feast. There are many great pagodas in Burma; there is the
Arakan pagoda in Mandalay, and there was the Incomparable pagoda, which
has been burnt; there are great pagodas at Pegu, at Prome, at many other
places; but perhaps the greatest of all is the Shwe Dagon at Rangoon.

You see it from far away as you come up the river, steaming in from the
open sea, a great tongue of flame before you. It stands on a small
conical hill just behind the city of Rangoon, about two miles away from
the wharves and shipping in the busy river. The hill has been levelled
on the top and paved into a wide platform, to which you ascend by a
flight of many steps from the gate below, where stand the dragons. This
entrance-way is all roofed over, and the pillars and the ceiling are red
and painted. Here it was that much fighting took place in the early
wars, in 1852 especially, and many men, English and Burmese, were killed
in storming and defending this strong place. For it had been made a
very strong place, this holy place of him who taught that peace was the
only good, and the defences round about it are standing still. Upon the
top of this hill, the flat paved top, stands the pagoda, a great solid
tapering cone over three hundred feet high, ending in an iron fretwork
spire that glitters with gold and jewels; and the whole pagoda is
covered with gold--pure leaf-gold. Down below it is being always renewed
by the pious offerings of those who come to pray and spread a little
gold-leaf on it; but every now and then it is all regilt, from the top,
far away above you, to the golden lions that guard its base. It is a
most wonderful sight, this great golden cone, in that marvellous
sunlight that bathes its sides like a golden sea. It seems to shake and
tremble in the light like a fire. And all about the platform, edging it
ere it falls away below, are little shrines, marvels of ca