reat feast, whenever the growing autumn moon
tells me that the end of Lent is drawing nigh, it is not the great feast
of the Shwe Dagon, nor of any other famous pagoda that comes into my
mind, but something far different.

It was on a frontier long ago that there was the festival that I
remember so well. The country there was very far away from all the big
towns; the people were not civilized as those of Mandalay or of Rangoon;
the pagoda was a very small one. There was no gilding upon it at all,
and no shrines were about it; it stood alone, just a little white
plastered pagoda, with a few trees near it, on a bare rice-field. There
were a few villages about, dotted here and there in the swamp, and the
people of these were all that came to our festival.

For long before the villages were preparing for it, saving a little
money here, doing a little extra work there, so that they might be able
to have presents ready for the monks, so that they might be able to
subscribe to the lights, so that they would have a good dress in which
they might appear.

The men did a little more work at the fields, bamboo-cutting in the
forest, making baskets in the evening, and the women wove. All had to
work very hard to have even a little margin; for there, although
food--plain rice--was very cheap, all other things were very expensive.
It was so far to bring them, and the roads were so bad. I remember that
the only European things to be bought there then were matches and
tinned milk, and copper money was not known. You paid a rupee, and took
the change in rice or other commodities.

The excitement of the great day of the full moon began in the morning,
about ten o'clock, with the offerings to the monks. Outside the village
gate there was a piece of straight road, dry and open, and on each side
of this, in rows, were the people with their gifts; mostly they were
eatables. You see that it is very difficult to find any variety of
things to give a monk; he is very strictly limited in the things he is
allowed to receive. Garments, yellow garments, curtains to partition off
corners of the monasteries and keep away the draughts, sacred books and
eatables--that is nearly all. But eatables allow a very wide range. A
monk may accept and eat any food--not drink, of course--provided he eat
but the one big meal a day before noon; and so most of the offerings
were eatables. Each donor knelt there upon the road with his or her
offerings in a tray in