er houses set in
green foliage. There are no canyons of art anywhere, and every scheme of
colouring depends on the power of the sun above. That is why men in a
London fog do still believe in pale greens and sad reds. Give me lilac,
pink, vermilion, lapis lazuli, and blistering blood red under fierce
sunlight that mellows and modifies all. I had just made this discovery
and was noting that the people treated their cattle kindly, when the
driver of an absurd little hired carriage built to the scale of a fat
Burma pony, volunteered to take me for a drive, and we drove in the
direction of the English quarter of the town where the sahibs live in
dainty little houses made out of the sides of cigar boxes. They looked
as if they could be kicked in at a blow and (trust a Globe-trotter for
evolving a theory at a minute's notice) it is to avoid this fate that
they are built for the most part on legs. The houses are not cantonment
bred in any way--nor did the uneven ground and dusty reddish roads fit
in with any part of the Indian Empire except it may be Ootacamund.

The pony wandered into a garden studded with lovely little lakes which,
again, were studded with islands, and there were sahibs in flannels in
the boats. Outside the park were pleasant little monasteries full of
clean-shaved gentlemen in gold amber robes learning to renounce the
world, the flesh, and the devil by chatting furiously amongst
themselves, and at every corner stood the three little maids from
school, almost exactly as they had been dismissed from the side scenes
of the Savoy after the _Mikado_ was over: and the strange part of it all
was that every one laughed--laughed, so it seemed, at the sky above them
because it was blue, at the sun because it was sinking, and at each
other because they had nothing better to do. A small fat child laughed
loudest of all, in spite of the fact that it was smoking a cheroot that
ought to have made it deathly sick. The pagoda was always close at
hand--as brilliant a mystery as when first sighted far down the river;
but it changed its shape as we came nearer, and showed in the middle of
a nest of hundreds of smaller pagodas. There appeared suddenly two
colossal tigers (after the Burmese canons) in plaster on a hillside, and
they were the guardians of Burma's greatest pagoda. Round them rustled a
great crowd of happy people in pretty dresses, and the feet of all were
turned towards a great stoneway that ran from between the tig