as a dish of mixed curry, and
he has now put some fruit on the table, and is bringing in coffee. He
cooks out there behind in the compound. I saw him just now bending over
a handful of sticks. However he manages to get the things hot I don't
know. These natives have marvellous ways.

We must rest a while this afternoon and have an early tea before
starting out to see the palace which lies inside that brick wall.

The tea is decent, the toast smoky, and the milk very poor. Ramaswamy
says that it is almost impossible to get milk; the Burmans don't drink
it themselves, and he thinks we shall have to fall back upon that
condensed stuff. However, there is excellent jam, and that is a good
thing. Look round this bare wooden room and notice how little furniture
one needs for perfect comfort. A couple of deck-chairs, a couple of
small chairs, a table, a lamp, and a waste-paper basket! What a lot of
superfluous furniture one does accumulate in England!

What are you smiling at? The recollection of the bath? It's a very good
way of bathing, I think. A wooden tub in the middle of a tiny room
without anything else in it. You can splash as much as ever you like,
and even if you spilt the whole bath it wouldn't matter much, because
the water would simply run down through the cracks in the plank floor,
and any one who knows anything here knows enough not to stand underneath
a bathroom which is built out on wooden legs.

We'll start now if you're ready! Hullo! Did you ever see anything so
impudent? A great crow on the tea-table! Frighten him away, he's after
those chocolates wrapped in silver paper that you brought up from
Rangoon. The cheek of it!

When we have passed over the white bridge and got inside the wall of the
palace we see a wide space of green with a few houses scattered here and
there, and in the middle a group of buildings, one of which has a very
tall spire. Inside this wall at one time, the Burman time, was crammed
the whole of Mandalay--six thousand houses, more or less. It _was_ the
town. The British cleared out all the houses, and the town is now
outside in wide streets,--we saw it this morning as we drove up from the
station,--and the palace is left here alone in its glory.

That tall, many-roofed spire is the King's house. Only the King was
allowed to rival the poongyis in the number of his roofs, no other
Burman might do such a thing. It is an empty distinction in two senses,
for, as you know, the roofs don