ing fire. There were
little boats, too, with the outlines marked with lamps, and there were
pagodas and miniature houses all floating, floating down the river,
till, in far distance by the promontory, the lamps flickered out one by
one, and the river fell asleep again.

'There is only one great festival in a girl's life,' a woman told me.
'We try to make it as good as we can. Boys have many festivals, girls
have but one. It is only just that it should be good.'

And so they grow up very quiet, very sedate, looking on the world about
them with very clear eyes. It is strange, talking to Burmese girls, to
see how much they know and understand of the world about them. It is to
them no great mystery, full of unimaginable good and evil, but a world
that they are learning to understand, and where good and evil are never
unmixed. Men are to them neither angels nor devils, but just men, and so
the world does not hold for them the disappointments, the
disillusionings, that await those who do not know. They have their
dreams--who shall doubt it?--dreams of him who shall love them, whom
they shall love, who shall make life one great glory to them; but their
dreams are dreams that can come true. They do not frame to themselves
ideals out of their own ignorance and imagine these to be good, but they
keep their eyes wide open to the far more beautiful realities that are
around them every day. They know that a living lover is greater, and
truer, and better than any ideal of a girl's dream. They live in a real
world, and they know that it is good.

In time the lover comes. There is a delightful custom all through Burma,
an institution, in fact, called 'courting-time.' It is from nine till
ten o'clock, more especially on moonlight nights, those wonderful tropic
nights, when the whole world lies in a silver dream, when the little
wandering airs that touch your cheek like a caress are heavy with the
scent of flowers, and your heart comes into your throat for the very
beauty of life.

There is in front of every house a veranda, raised perhaps three feet
from the ground, and there the girl will sit in the shadow of the eaves,
sometimes with a friend, but usually alone; and her suitors will come
and stand by the veranda, and talk softly in little broken sentences, as
lovers do. There maybe be many young men come, one by one, if they mean
business, with a friend if it be merely a visit of courtesy. And the
girl will receive them all, and w