l parts quieted down, I was sent to the frontier, first on
the North and then on the East by the Chin mountains; so that it was not
until 1890 that a transfer to a more settled part gave me quiet and
opportunity for consideration of all I had seen and known. For it was in
those years that I gained most of whatever little knowledge I have of
the Burmese people.

Months, very many months, I passed with no one to speak to, with no
other companions but Burmese. I have been with them in joy and in
sorrow, I have fought with them and against them, and sat round the
camp-fire after the day's work and talked of it all. I have had many
friends amongst them, friends I shall always honour; and I have seen
them killed sometimes in our fights, or dead of fever in the marshes of
the frontier. I have known them from the labourer to the Prime Minister,
from the little neophyte just accepted into the faith to the head of all
the Burmese religion. I have known their wives and daughters; have
watched many a flirtation in the warm scented evenings; and have seen
girls become wives and wives mothers while I have lived amongst them. So
that although when the country settled down, and we built houses for
ourselves and returned more to English modes of living, I felt that I
was drifting away from them into the conventionality and ignorance of
our official lives, yet I had in my memory much of what I had seen, much
of what I had done, that I shall never forget. I felt that I had
been--even if it were only for a time--behind the veil, where it is so
hard to come.

In looking over these memories it seemed to me that there were many
things I did not understand, acts of theirs and customs, which I had
seen and noted, but of which I did not know the reason. We all know how
hard it is to see into the heart even of our own people, those of our
flesh and blood who are with us always, whose ways are our ways, and
whose thoughts are akin to ours. And if this be so with them, it is ten
thousand times harder with those whose ways are not our ways, and from
whose thoughts we must be far apart. It is true that there are no dark
places in the lives of the Burmese as there are in the lives of other
Orientals. All is open to the light of day in their homes and in their
religion, and their women are the freest in the world. Yet the barriers
of a strange tongue and a strange religion, and of ways caused by
another climate than ours, is so great that, even to tho