Chinese lanterns hang or stand about. The floor is literally covered with silver and gold cups and betel-boxes, of all sizes, from that of a soup-tureen down to a breakfast cup. Some are plain; some of that repoussé work at which the Burmese silversmiths are so clever. The great majority of these are of course borrowed from friends (of another street or quarter) or hired for the night from the chetty pawnbrokers. A few chairs and tables stand about for any European visitors who may come, and who are sure of a friendly welcome. At the back of the room in a long line, behind the mirrors and statuettes, sit the girls, decked out in their most expensively embroidered skirts and gayest silk neckerchiefs. They are literally loaded with jewellery. Round their necks and over the bosom hangs the broad network of the dahleezan, formed of silver or gold fishes and flowers linked together. The na-doung, the huge gold plugs or circlets in their ears, sparkle with rubies and emeralds. So do the bracelets on their arms and the rings on their fingers. Each girl as she sits is worth many hundred rupees. It is probably for this reason that they are made so inaccessible, seated behind the lamps and lights. If admiring swains could get at them, so could other individuals, whose regard for the jewellery might exceed that for the commandments. The young women may therefore be supposed not to care so much for the Sohn-daw-gyee fête as their brothers. Most of the girls are of course daughters of the house. If, however, the householder has not womankind enough, he simply goes out into the bazaar and hires as many personable looking damsels as he may find necessary. They are as much a part of the display as the silver cups and the looking-glasses. A band at one end of the room discourses music fitfully. Occasionally a girl, too young to have attained to the dignity of jewellery, gets up and dances and sings for a while, Musical instruments of different kinds, pattala, hnè, and mee-gyoung, harmonicons, trumpets and alligator guitars, lie scattered about here and there for the amusement of skilled visitors, and there is always somebody thrumming or tootling away on them. The whole scene is an unceasing round of laughter and gaiety. The host and hostess and a few old women bustle about and receive the visitors, point out the most noteworthy parts of the display, have a few words of conversation, and offer refreshments. The guest drinks a cup of singularly washy and saccharine tea or lemonade, smokes a big green cheroot, or chews a fid of betel, compliments the owner of the house, declares he never saw so much magnificence in his life, and departs to go through the same performance in the next house. Englishmen are always welcome. Seats are brought for them; the master of the house sits by while they are under his roof, explains everything to the best of his ability, and produces the inevitable bottle of brandy or beer, without which no European is supposed to be able to endure existence. The reception begins at eight, or half-past, and lasts for an hour and a half or so. Then every one who is the round of his friends, pretty well over. The coming has arrived, and has gone so that the domestic display is gorgeously arrayed females gather up their skirts, and go off home under a guard of their male relatives, and having put off the greater part of their jewellery, come back, each with a huge green cheroot in her mouth, to see the play and join in the fun. A few of the older people remain indoors, steadily chewing betel, comparing notes as to past displays, and speculating as to whether any other street in the town will be able to surpass the display of Eighteenth Street. Not a few placidly go to sleep, notwithstanding the din without, the strident sounds of the band, the shouts at the buffoonery of the clown, and the confused chatter of thousands of voices. Outside there is no slackening in the jollity. From the lofty stage representing the second heaven of the nats, portions of the Law are declaimed; the celestial beings deliver themselves of sugga-gyee, lordly sentiments, revellings in exuberant verbosity, all night long, and the constantly shifting audience never thins away. Farther up the street a huge pasteboard demon is gambolling unwieldily, half-a-dozen dancers twirling and twisting vigorously within a foot or two of its great tusked jaws. At intervals some of the youths of the street, or some of the visitors, worked into a state of excitement by the music, dance enthusiastically in an unattached kind of fashion for a few minutes, and then suddenly break off with a laugh. Some of the young men spend most of the time flitting about the extemporised stalls, tasting at one place fish jelly, at another queer salads, having a violent flavour of garlic; here smoking a cheroot, there chewing a packet of pickled tea, and flirting in turn with all the girl vendors, who look very coquettish with the red or white flowers in their glossy black hair, and the fragrant, yellow thana'kah toning down their complexion. Not in the least shy they are, and quite ready to bandy Oriental compliments with new acquaintances. It is with many of the younger folks the pleasantest part of the feast-and is not the old duenna sitting behind—what matter though she is asleep-to play propriety? And so the merriment goes on all night, fit occupation provided for all; sleep or high moral declaimings, combined with the clown's comedy for the elderly; abundance to eat, and a surfeit of gossip for the lazy and middle-aged, and indiscriminate love-making and dancing and noise for the young. At length, with dawn of day, which in those low latitudes corresponds with the rising of the sun, the ascetics come round in grave, yellow procession, their hands clasped round the thabeht, their eyes downcast. The bowls are filled; the rest of the feast is carried humbly to the monastery by the donors, and the Eighteenth Street Sohn-daw-gyee pwè is over. The celebrators sleep all day; the state of digestion of the monks is not a matter for discussion; and those visitors who have got new ideas from what they saw last night, lose no time in making use of them for the better glorification of their own fête, which comes off a few days later. CHAPTER V. A WORK OF MERIT. "THE wisdom that made Asia mild" laid down no command which is better observed in Burma than the first of the Five Rules: Thoo a-thet go ma that hnin (Thou shalt not take any life at all). Hardened convicts will not harm the vermin that infest their mattresses. A story is told of a man who allowed the snake that had killed his father to wriggle away unmolested through the tall elephant grass. I myself have seen a Burmese mother take up between two bits of bamboo the scorpion that had stung her little son, and simply throw the hideous creature out of the house. So far does the command to beware how they harm any meanest thing in its upward path lead earnest Buddhists. Mr. Edwin Arnold tells how, in a distant age, the great Lord Buddha offered up himself to preserve 'this breath of fleeting life" in an animal: ་་ "Drought withered all the land; the young rice died When between the hot walls of a nullah, our Lord spied, as he passed, a starving tigress, with two little cubs whining for the nourishment her shrunken frame could not give them. Then, heeding nought but the immense |