at hunting must produce. 'Is there no food in
the bazaar, that you must go and take the lives of animals?' has been
said to me many a time. And when my house-roof was infested by sparrows,
who dropped grass and eggs all over my rooms, so that I was obliged to
shoot them with a little rifle, this was no excuse. 'You should have
built a sparrow-cote,' they told me. 'If you had built a sparrow-cote,
they would have gone away and left you in peace. They only wanted to
make nests and lay eggs and have little ones, and you went and shot
them.' There are many sparrow-cotes to be seen in the villages.

I might give example after example of this sort, for they happen every
day. We who are meat-eaters, who delight in shooting, who have a horror
of insects and reptiles, are continually coming into collision with the
principles of our neighbours; for even harmful reptiles they do not care
to kill. Truly I believe it is a myth, the story of the Burmese mother
courteously escorting out of the house the scorpion which had just
bitten her baby. A Burmese mother worships her baby as much as the woman
of any other nation does, and I believe there is no crime she would not
commit in its behalf. But if she saw a scorpion walking about in the
fields, she would not kill it as we should. She would step aside and
pass on. 'Poor beast!' she would say, 'why should I hurt it? It never
hurt me.'

The Burman never kills insects out of sheer brutality. If a beetle drone
annoyingly, he will catch it in a handkerchief and put it outside, and
so with a bee. It is a great trouble often to get your Burmese servants
to keep your house free of ants and other annoying creatures. If you
tell them to kill the insects they will, for in that case the sin falls
on you. Without special orders they would rather leave the ants alone.

In the district in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful.
There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's
viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is
very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very
prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he
is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you
can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. Then he will bite you, and you
die. He comes out usually in the evening before dark, and lies about on
footpaths to catch the home-coming ploughman or reaper, and, contrary to
the