klings, and had them fed up so that they
might be fat and succulent when the time came for them to be served at
table. They became very fine ducks, and my friend had promised me one. I
took an interest in them, and always noticed their increasing fatness
when I rode that way. Imagine, then, my disappointment when one day I
saw that all the ducks had disappeared.

I stopped to inquire. Yes, truly they were all gone, my friend told me.
In his absence his wife had gone up the river to visit some friends, and
had taken the ducks with her. She could not bear, she said, that they
should be killed, so she took them away and distributed them among her
friends, one here and one there, where she was sure they would be well
treated and not killed. When she returned she was quite pleased at her
success, and laughed at her husband and me.

This same lady was always terribly distressed when she had to order a
fowl to be killed for her husband's breakfast, even if she had never
seen it before. I have seen her, after telling the cook to kill a fowl
for breakfast, run away and sit down in the veranda with her hands over
her ears, and her face the very picture of misery, fearing lest she
should hear its shrieks. I think that this was the one great trouble to
her in her marriage, that her husband would insist on eating fowls and
ducks, and that she had to order them to be killed.

As she is, so are most Burmans. If there is all this trouble about
fowls, it can be imagined how the trouble increases when it comes to
goats or any larger beasts. In the jungle villages meat of any kind at
all is never seen: no animals of any kind are allowed to be killed. An
officer travelling in the district would be reduced to what he could
carry with him, if it were not for an Act of Government obliging
villages to furnish--on payment, of course--supplies for officers and
troops passing through. The mere fact of such a law being necessary is
sufficient proof of the strength of the feeling against taking life.

Of course, all shooting, either for sport or for food, is looked upon as
disgraceful. In many jungle villages where deer abound there are one or
two hunters who make a living by hunting. But they are disgraced men.
They are worse than fishermen, and they will have a terrible penalty to
pay for it all. It will take much suffering to wash from their souls the
cruelty, the blood-thirstiness, the carelessness to suffering, the
absence of compassion, th