k
from up-country, an invitation we gladly accept. He also promises to
make everything easy for us on our tour. As we go away, after having
taken our leave, I hear you say thoughtfully--

"I think I'd like to be a Lieutenant-Governor when I grow up!"

It is a good ambition, but you will have to be clever and very hard
working to achieve it, and even then you will want a bit of luck. You
must go into the Indian Civil Service first, and after all, of course,
you may never get there, but with a bit of luck----

[Illustration: THE PALACE.]

CHAPTER XXIII

THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

"This butter is uneatable, Ramaswamy."

"I wash him, Master."

He takes away the dish of nasty, yellow, tinned butter and presently
returns with it fresh and white, with much of the disagreeable taste and
smell gone. Good! Now we know.

We are sitting on a broad verandah of dark wood with a roof overhead. It
is so wide that it is just like a room, only the outer sides are open.
We look out over a moat filled with water and covered with leaves and
pink flowers. These are the celebrated lotus flowers, or lilies. Behind
rise red walls, with here and there quaint little maroon-coloured
towers, all pinnacles and angles, showing up like fretwork against the
sky. The moat is crossed by bridges of dazzling white. It is nearly
midday, the hottest and stillest time of all the day, and we are
lunching in the Circuit House at Mandalay, the old capital of the kings
of Burma.

Everyone knows Mandalay by name from Kipling's poem, even if they know
nothing of the rest of Burma. We came up here from Rangoon by train,--it
took a night,--and by special permission of His Excellency were allowed
to stay in this house, which is usually reserved for Government
officials, instead of going to the rest-house intended for visitors, and
not nearly so nice.

From where we sit we can look through into the wooden unpapered bedrooms
behind, with the little string beds on which our own bedding lies in
heaps. Ramaswamy has not had time to put it out yet, for he has been
busy cooking our tiffin. In these houses the keeper, or _derwan_, will
do everything for you if you like, and you pay him so much for his
trouble, but if you prefer your own servant to do it you can make that
arrangement and borrow the pots and pans. Ramaswamy has given us already
buttered eggs, some cutlets which tasted goaty, with some excellent
little vegetables called bringals, as well