the Chinese, "enlightenment finds its way even among the outer
barbarians."

There is a military hospital with two nursing sisters, highly trained
ladies from Bart.'s. Australians are now so widely distributed over the
world that it did not surprise me to find that one of the two sisters
comes from Melbourne.

From Mandalay I went by train to Rangoon, where I lived in a pretty
villa among noble trees on the lower slope of the hill which is crowned
with the famous golden pagoda, the "Shway-dagon," the most sacred temple
of Indo-China. We looked out upon the park and the royal lake. I early
went to the Intelligence Department and saw Major Couchman. In his
office I met the chief Chinese interpreter, a Chinaman with a rare
genius for languages. He is a native of Fuhkien province, and, of
course, speaks the Fuhkien dialect; he knows also Cantonese and
Mandarin. In addition, he possesses French, Hindustani, Burmese, Shan,
and Sanscrit, and, in an admirable translation which he has made of a
Chinese novel into English, he frequently quotes Latin. Fit assistant he
would make to Max Mueller; his services command a high salary.

The Chinese in Rangoon are a predominating force in the prosperity of
the city. They have deeply impressed their potentiality upon the
community. "It seems almost certain," says a great authority, perhaps
_the_ greatest authority on Burma--J. G. Scott (Shway Yoe)--"that in no
very long time Burma, or, at any rate, the large trading towns of Burma,
will be for all practical purposes absorbed by the Chinese traders, just
as Singapore and Penang are virtually Chinese towns. Unless some
marvellous upheaval of energy takes place in the Burmese character, the
plodding, unwearying Chinaman is almost certainly destined to overrun
the country to the exclusion of the native race."

The artisans of Rangoon are largely Chinese, and the carpenters
exclusively so. The Chinese marry Burmese women, and, treating their
wives with the consideration which the Chinaman invariably extends to
his foreign wife in a foreign country, they are desired as husbands even
above the Burmans. Next to the British, the only indispensable element
in the community is now the Chinese.

The best known figure in Burma is the Reverend John Ebenezer Marks,
D.D., Principal of the St. John's College of the S.P.G. Dr. Marks has
been thirty-five years in Burma, is still hale and hearty, brimful of
reminiscences, and is one of the most amusing