SHMENT

'Overcome anger by kindness, evil by good.'
_Dammapada._

Not very many years ago an officer in Rangoon lost some currency notes.
He had placed them upon his table overnight, and in the morning they
were gone. The amount was not large. It was, if I remember rightly,
thirty rupees; but the loss annoyed him, and as all search and inquiry
proved futile, he put the matter in the hands of the police.

Before long--the very next day--the possession of the notes was traced
to the officer's Burman servant, who looked after his clothes and
attended on him at table. The boy was caught in the act of trying to
change one of the notes. He was arrested, and he confessed. He was very
hard up, he said, and his sister had written asking him to help her. He
could not do so, and he was troubling himself about the matter early
that morning while tidying the room, and he saw the notes on the table,
and so he took them. It was a sudden temptation, and he fell. When the
officer learnt all this, he would, I think, have withdrawn from the
prosecution and forgiven the boy; but it was too late. In our English
law theft is not compoundable. A complaint of theft once made must be
proved or disproved; the accused must be tried before a magistrate.
There is no alternative. So the lad--he was only a lad--was sent up
before the magistrate, and he again pleaded guilty, and his master asked
that the punishment might be light. The boy, he said, was an honest boy,
and had yielded to a sudden temptation. He, the master, had no desire to
press the charge, but the reverse. He would never have come to court at
all if he could have withdrawn from the charge. Therefore he asked that
the magistrate would consider all this, and be lenient.

But the magistrate did not see matters in the same light at all. He
would consider his judgment, and deliver it later on.

When he came into court again and read the judgment he had prepared, he
said that he was unable to treat the case leniently. There were many
such cases, he said. It was becoming quite common for servants to steal
their employers' things, and they generally escaped. It was a serious
matter, and he felt himself obliged to make an example of such as were
convicted, to be a warning to others. So the boy was sentenced to six
months' rigorous imprisonment; and his master went home, and before
long had forgotten all about it.

But one day, as he was sittin