ON A CARGO BOAT
DANCING GIRL, BURMA.
Did you ever see anything like it in your life? I never did.
We are on a steamer coming down the Irrawaddy River from Mandalay, and it is our first evening on board. We are not the only passengers, there are also a widow lady and her daughter, a girl a few years older than you, but still in pigtails, whose name is Joyce. We were all four sitting very comfortably after dinner on the deck, which is roofed in, making a fine open room like a verandah, when a few large, light-coloured moths appeared; then, as if by magic, the whole deck was suddenly alive with them. They banged against the glass of the lights, thumped into our faces, and whirled around exactly like a thick snowstorm with very large flakes.
"It's one of the plagues of Egypt," you yell.
Joyce screams, pulls her long plaits round her face to prevent the moths catching in them, and dives for her cabin. Everyone follows suit, and soon anxious voices can be heard asking, "How many got in with you?"
It is impossible to shut the port-hole, and in less time than I can tear off my clothes my tiny room is as bad as the deck.
Luckily there are mosquito-curtains, and glad of them we are, as we can hear the loathsome soft-bodied creatures blundering about outside them.
Lo! in the morning they are all gone, and when I get on deck, and ask the captain, a stern soul from Aberdeen, where they have disappeared to, he points to the river. "Where would they be? Overboard, of course. Dead, every one of them. They live but a day."