the thousands of
people I passed, there was not one woman with draperies arranged in the
classic folds we saw in Bangalore; their worn bundles of dirty white
drapery seemed just to be thrown on anyhow, and their type of face was
much more elementary than that of the natives, even so little to the
north as Mysore--Apologies for such rude sketches.

[Illustration: Madras Bangalore]

I'd just begun to vote Madras a sell when a line of thin-stemmed trees
came in sight--tamarisks, I think--with feathery grey-green pine-like
foliage and deep shadows, and figures under them on white sand, and
through the trunks a great sweep of blue ocean, real southern blue--and
I thought of turtles and the early traders, and John Company, and forgot
about the ugly figures and the smells in the town. A little farther on,
I came on the harbour with a few ocean-going crafts, and the _Renown_,
waiting for the Prince, conspicuous in brilliant white and green on her
water-line.

We had by this time decided to go to Burmah, so I'd come to the docks to
Binney & Co. to see about berths. An article I read by an engineer--my
thanks for it--called, "Fourteen days leave from India," in _T. P.'s
Weekly_, and Mr Fielding Hall's "Soul of the People," helped to decide
our going farther east. The article described vividly the change to the
better in regard to the colouring and people in coming from India to
Burmah. If India then seemed to me picturesque, it was surely worth the
effort to cross the little bit of sea to Rangoon. It was difficult to
leave the harbour and the Masulah boats; they are thoroughly ugly yet
perfectly well-fitted for their work! They are almost like the shape of
children's paper boats, high out of the water, over four feet freeboard
and seven feet beam, and I'd say about twenty-five to thirty feet over
all, with practically flat bottoms. Six or seven rowers perch on bamboo
thwarts, level with top of the gunwale, and row with bamboos with flat
round blades tied to their ends. They come stem on through the low surf
on the harbour strand, then just as they are touching the shore, are
swung broadside on, the natives spring out into the shoal water, and out
comes the lading, piece by piece, on their shoulders sacks, bales,
boxes, etc., and all the time the boat is bumping up the sloping sand
sideways and unharmed apparently by the seas bursting on its outside.
Ugly is no word for them, but fit they were, though Ruskin's "Beauty of
Fitnes