ter, and wished
that I had enough Burmese to explain to these ladies that I was sorry
and would have taken off my hat but for the sun. A Globe-trotter is a
brute. I had the grace to blush as I tramped round the pagoda. That
will be remembered to me for righteousness. But I stared horribly--at a
gold and red side-temple with a beautifully gilt image of Buddha in
it--at the grim figures in the niches at the base of the main pagoda--at
the little palms that grew out of the cracks in the tiled paving of the
court--at the big palms above, and at the low hung bronze bells that
stood at each corner for the women to smite with stag-horns. Upon one
bell rang this amazing triplet in English, evidently the composition of
the caster, who completed his work--and now, let us hope, has reached
Nibban--thirty-five years ago:--

"He who destroyed this Bell
They must be in the great Hel
And unable to coming out."

I respect a man who is not able to spell Hell properly. It shows that he
has been brought up in an amiable creed. You who come to Moulmein treat
this bell with respect, and refrain from playing with it, for that hurts
the feelings of the worshippers.

In the base of the pagoda were four rooms, lined as to three sides with
colossal plaster figures, before each of whom burned one solitary dip
whose rays fought with the flood of evening sunshine that came through
the windows, and the room was filled with a pale yellow light--unearthly
to stand in. Occasionally a woman crept in to one of these rooms to
pray, but nearly all the company stayed in the courtyard; but those that
faced the figures prayed more zealously than the others, so I judged
that their troubles were the greater. Of the actual cult I knew less
than nothing; for the neatly bound English books that we read make no
mention of pointing red-tipped straws at a golden image, or of the
banging of bells after the custom of worshippers in a Hindu temple. It
must be a genial one, however. To begin with, it is quiet and carried on
among the fairest possible surroundings that ever landscape offered.

In this particular case, the massive white pagoda shot into the blue
from the west of a walled hill that commanded four separate and
desirable views as you looked either at the steamer in the river below,
the polished silver reaches to the left, the woods to the right, or the
roofs of Moulmein to the landward. Between each pause of the rustling of
dresses and the lo