almost everywhere. They are caught in great
quantities in the river, and are sold in most bazaars, either fresh or
salted. It is one of the staple foods of the Burmese. But although they
will eat fish, they despise the fisherman. Not so much, perhaps, as if
he killed other living things, but still, the fisherman is an outcast
from decent society. He will have to suffer great and terrible
punishment before he can be cleansed from the sins that he daily
commits. Notwithstanding this, there are many fishermen in Burma.

A fish is a very cold-blooded beast. One must be very hard up for
something to love to have any affection to spare upon fishes. They
cannot be, or at all events they never are, domesticated, and most of
them are not beautiful. I am not aware that they have ever been known to
display any attachment to anyone, which accounts, perhaps, for the
comparatively lenient eye with which their destruction is contemplated.

For with warm-blooded animals it is very different. Cattle, as I have
said, can never be killed nor their meat sold by a Burman, and with
other animals the difficulty is not much less.

I was in Upper Burma for some months before the war, and many a time I
could get no meat at all. Living in a large town among prosperous
people, I could get no flesh at all, only fish and rice and vegetables.
When, after much trouble, my Indian cook would get me a few fowls, he
would often be waylaid and forced to release them. An old woman, say,
anxious to do some deed of merit, would come to him as he returned
triumphantly home with his fowls and tender him money, and beg him to
release the fowls. She would give the full price or double the price of
the fowls; she had no desire to gain merit at another person's expense,
and the unwilling cook would be obliged to give up the fowls. Public
opinion was so strong he dare not refuse. The money was paid, the fowls
set free, and I dined on tinned beef.

And yet the villages are full of fowls. Why they are kept I do not know.
Certainly not for food. I do not mean to say that an accidental meeting
between a rock and a fowl may not occasionally furnish forth a dinner,
but this is not the object with which they are kept--of this I am sure.

You would not suppose that fowls were capable of exciting much
affection, yet I suppose they are. Certainly in one case ducks were.
There is a Burman lady I know who is married to an Englishman. He kept
ducks. He bought a number of duc