d fro--a lanky, long-haired youth, his hands
behind his back, looking into his particular future, a life devoted to
convert the gracious, charitable followers of Gautauma Buddha to--his
reading of Christ's simple teaching.

CHAPTER XXIV

RANGOON GYMKHANA

[Illustration]

January 7th.--We danced--I danced with ladies in Gainsborough hats,
their feathers tickling my eye, in pork pie hats, and Watteaus, and
picture hats like sparrows' nests; and there were little dumpy ladies
and tall, stately, Junos, _i.e._, compared with Eastern women. And it
was so funny to see men in suits of blue serge, tweeds, or tussore silk,
whirling round with ladies in muslins of every lovely colour. If the men
had only worn bowlers and smoked cigars, how it would have taken me back
to student days in Antwerp at Carnival time, not so jolly of course, but
very different from anything at home. And how stately are the
club-rooms--really they are well off these relations of ours "Out
East"--don't believe their groans altogether! it is hot now, they say,
but look at the fun they have, especially ladies. There are ladies'
billiard-rooms, card-rooms, music-rooms, reading-rooms inside, and
outside, lawns and flowers and attendants to fetch and carry, and swains
to admire them, and they have latest dresses, dances, balls, riding,
tennis all the time, and Royalties and Viceroys at intervals. Compare
this to the humdrum life of our women in Scotland with their brothers
and cousins, "A wede awa" to the uttermost ends of the Empire, and never
a Viceroy or Royalty of any description to show above their level
horizon--that is intolerable.

Then home to dinner, very full of interest and wonder at the sights of
the day, and scribbled the above dance scene, and dressed and walked
over the way in the soft dust in the soft moonlight and dined with
friends and relations, and talked in the dark teak-wood bungalow of
other friends and relations and home things, and looked at curios and
sketches; and little lizards looked out at us from the walls, and a huge
piebald fellow up in the shadows of the wooden roof, a foot and a half
long if an inch, a _Chuck-Tu_, didn't frighten our hosts in the least!
Then across the strip of moonlit, to sleep my lone, under the hospitable
teak roof-trees of "a Binning!"

Here there seems to be a hiatus in these notes of mine--it is rather a
jump from the British India steamer to a Gymkhana dance? But such a
break gives reli