s voices can be heard asking, "How many got in with you?"

It is impossible to shut the port-hole, and in less time than I can tear
off my clothes my tiny room is as bad as the deck.

Luckily there are mosquito-curtains, and glad of them we are, as we can
hear the loathsome soft-bodied creatures blundering about outside them.

Lo! in the morning they are all gone, and when I get on deck, and ask
the captain, a stern soul from Aberdeen, where they have disappeared to,
he points to the river. "Where would they be? Overboard, of course.
Dead, every one of them. They live but a day."

Leaning over the vessel's side I see some of the gummy bodies, mere
hollow shells now, transparent and fragile, sticking on to the black
paint about the bows. The creatures are white ants who come out of holes
in the ground at this time of year. Our lights attracted a new-born
swarm. At least that must have been it, because we weren't plagued with
them again in the same way, though the captain says that in the wet
season it is impossible to sit on the deck at all in the evenings
because of the multitude of winged things.

"But then you haven't got any hair," I hear Joyce's cheerful voice
saying on the deck. You evidently reply something, for she rejoins at
once, "Oh yes, it's in plaits, but they might stick in them! I've always
had a creepy horror of crawly things sticking in my hair."

"Cut it off," you suggest brutally.

This is a cargo boat. We had much to see at Mandalay; we visited the
Aracan Pagoda and Golden Temple, we went up to the hill-station, Maymyo,
and on to the Gokteik Gorge, spanned by one of the highest trestle
bridges in the world, and when we arrived back at Mandalay we found that
the passenger boat had just left, so we came on by this one, the
_China_, which is really just as comfortable and not so crowded. She is
fitted with bathrooms and comfortable cabins with little beds in them,
and on the spacious upper deck are two immense mirrors so placed that
all the sights on the shore are reflected in them. You can sit in a
lounge-chair and watch them flash past like a continuous cinematograph.

The Irrawaddy flows right through Burma, cutting it in half, as the Nile
does Egypt; and it is rather like the Nile, but, of course, not nearly
so long, not so long even as the Ganges, though steamers can go up it
for nine hundred miles, equal to the length of England and Scotland put
together! The river is wide and shallow in pla