e green cheroots or small brown ones.
Our seats are right in front of the stage and consist of a row of
soap-boxes. Joyce's mother clutches me in horror. "I can't sit down
there," she says with a gasp; "I shall fall over." The captain
misunderstands her and gallantly tries one himself, saying, "It holds
me, Madam." As he is at least sixteen stone in weight this sends Joyce
off into fits of irrepressible giggles, luckily drowned by the band,
which is making an ear-splitting noise--"La-la-la, la-la-la!" One man
bangs an instrument like those called harmonicons, with slats of metal
set across it all the way up. Another is seated inside a tub, the rim of
which is entirely composed of small drums; another cracks bamboo
clappers together in an agonising way, while clarionets do their best,
and a pipe fills in all the intervals it can find.

A girl with a very coquettish gold-embroidered jacket, which stands out
behind like two pert wings in the same way as those worn by the
princesses at the garden-party, is rouging her face close to us; she
gets it to her liking by leaning over the footlights and gazing in a
little hand-mirror, then she takes up an enormous cigar which lies
smoking beside her and puffs away contentedly till her turn comes.

Two clowns are taking their part; we can't understand a word they say,
but their humorous faces and comic gestures are irresistibly funny.
Suddenly Golden-Jacket puts down her cigar, springs to her feet, and
gets across the shaking boards with marvellous serpentine movements in a
skirt tighter even than a modern one, literally a tube wound around her
legs. Then, waving her long thin hands and arms so that ripples seem to
run up and down them, she sings in a thin shrill voice a long song,
while one of the clowns breaks in with "Yes, yes" and "Come on," meant
for us and greatly appreciated by the audience. As the song wends toward
its end, Golden-Jacket looks behind her more than once, and at last
stops and says something out loud.

"She's telling the villain to hurry up or she won't wait for him,"
explains the captain, who understands Burmese. "She is in a forest. You
see the branch of a tree stuck between the boards there? That's the
forest. She went to meet her lover, the prince, for she is a princess,
of course, but the villain has done his job, and now he's going to catch
her."

[Illustration: IN THE PLAYHOUSE.]

The princess trills out some more lines, and the villain, who has
a