on
the top of the banks, their foliage drooping over cottages. These are
very neatly built on teak-wood legs. You can see into some of them
through the bamboo walls and floors, and see touches of rich colour in
their brown interiors--ladies in emerald silk and powdered faces, jet
black hair and white torch cheroot, and, perhaps, the goodman coming in,
in green cloth jacket, pink round his hair, and say, a crushed
strawberry _putsoe_ down to the middle of his sturdy brown calves.

A number of Burmese get off here. Up the sandy bank are collected about
fifty carts. The bullocks in them are finely bred, and are coloured like
fallow deer, and look fat and well-cared for. The carts are
sand-coloured and sun-bleached, with great thick wheels, and the
contrast of the dainty passengers--women and children with neat
packages--getting into these is very pleasant. The men busy themselves
yoking the oxen; they are dressed in bright silks and cottons, several
have M'Pherson tartan _putsoes_. A mother lifts her butterfly-coloured
children into the clean straw and gets in herself, and the eldest
daughter, with white jacket and prettily-dressed hair, steps in
demurely, tucks up her knees in her exquisite plum-coloured silk skirt,
and away they go in dust and sun and jollity--verily, I do believe, that
Solomon in his very Sunday best was not a patch to one of these daintly
dressed figures....

I walk along the country road and have a glimpse of the white and gold
of a pagoda, and a glimpse of the river through tree trunks in shadow,
and wish the steamer's horn for recall would not sound for many days.

21st January.--Past Mimbu--sands wide and whitey-grey. There are white
cirri on blue--sky and sand repeated on the river's surface. At the ends
of the sand-spits are waders--oyster catchers I vow--one might be at
Arisaig in a splendid June instead of the Irrawaddy in January.... Long
rafts of teak logs pass us occasionally, drifting slowly down with the
current. The three or four oarsmen, when they see us, run about over the
round logs and give a pull here and a pull there at long oars, and try
to get the unwieldy length up and down stream; they wear only a waist
cloth, and look so sun-bitten; there is but one tiny patch of shadow in
the middle of their island under a lean-to cottage of matting, with a
burgee on a tall bamboo flying over it. Our wash sends their dug-out
canoe bobbling alongside their raft, and splashes over and between