I awoke suddenly to the fact of great loneliness. There were multitudes of people, but in the whole company not a familiar face. There were some whose names we had heard, and they were ready to give us a cordial welcome as fellow-workers, but we did not know them from all the others in the throng in whose thoughts we had no place. For myself, I have never had a more lonely moment, even when unattended in the Burma jungles or lost on the mountains at night.
Another incident, of a painful kind, occurred. As I stood beside the ship’s doctor, who had been coming and going to India for thirty years, he volunteered information of the people who were boarding the ship to greet expected friends. One young lady passenger was greeted by her sister, whose husband stood by her side. She was a fair English lady; he was a tall, well-proportioned man of good features, but he was very dark. The doctor said: “That young lady is destined to a great disappointment. Her sister is married to a Eurasian, and she, as an English girl, will have no social recognition among English people here because she has that Eurasian relationship.” To my inquiries of interest, he said many things about these people, in whose veins flow the blood of European and Asiatic, concluding with the following slander on these people, “They inherit the vices of both Europeans and Asiatics and the virtues of neither.” I refer to this expression here to show how such unjust expressions fall from careless tongues; for I have heard it scores of times, breathing out unkind, even cruel injustice. It is a slander that is not often rebuked with the energy its injustice calls for. As I will discuss this people in another chapter, I only say here that for ten years I have been connected with them, and while they have their weaknesses, this charge against them is entirely groundless.
We were presently greeted by the small band of Methodist missionaries and some of their friends, and taken immediately to our Girls’ School in the heart of the town. Here we rested in easy-chairs of an uncouth pattern, but which we have hundreds of times since had occasion to prove capable of affording great comfort. While resting and making the acquaintance of Miss Scott, our hostess, an agent of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, I was impressed with several features of our new surroundings. Though it was New-Year’s Eve, the whole house was wide open, and three sides of the sitting-room had open venetian blinds instead of walls, to let in the air.
Then we were quickly conscious of the noise, mostly of human voices, speaking or shouting strange speech in every direction, which the wooden open-plank house caught up much as a violin does its sound, and multiplied without transferring them into music. We came, by later painful experiences, to know that one of the enemies of nerves and the working force of the missionary in Rangoon is the ceaseless noise from human throats that seems inseparable from this Oriental city. I have been in some other noisy cities, but, as Bishop Thoburn once remarked, our location in Rangoon was “the noisiest place in the world.” Before these thoughts had taken full possession of our minds, we were greeted by another surprise. As we leaned back in the easy-chairs and our eyes sought the high ceiling of the room, there we saw small lizards moving about, sometimes indeed stationary, but more often running or making quick leaps as they caught sluggish beetles or unsuspecting flies from the ceiling. We counted nine of them in plain view, seemingly enjoying themselves, unmindful of the presence of the residents of the building or the nerves or tastes of the new arrivals.
A watch-night service was held that night intended for sailors and soldiers especially, to which I went, while my wife remained and rested at the school with our children. At the service I saw for the first time what is so common in all like gatherings in Eastern cities, the strange mingling of all people who speak the English language. Being a seaport, the sailors from every European land were present, and, so far as they can be secured, attend this wholesome service, while the soldiers from the garrison come in crowds, and others interested in these meetings are there also. Every shade of Eurasians was present. Some of the people whom I saw that night for the first time became my friends and co-laborers in the Church and mission for the entire time of which I write. Late that night, or in the earliest hour of the new year, I fell asleep with my latest conscious thought, “We are in Burma.”
CHAPTER II
First Year in Burma
We were wakened early on January 1, 1891, by the harsh cawing of a myriad of crows, which roost in the shade-trees of the public streets and private yards. We came afterwards to know these annoying pests, that swarm over Rangoon all day long, as a tribe of thieves full of all cunning and audacity. The first exhibition of their pilfering given us, was that first morning when the early tea and toast, always brought to you on rising in India, was passed into our room and placed in reach of the children. The crows had been perched on the window-sill before this, restlessly watching us within the room. But on our turning for a moment from the tray on which the toast was placed, the crows swooped upon it, and carried it off out of the window. This is but a sample of the audacious annoyance suffered from their beaks and claws continually. They are in country places also, but not so plentifully as here in the cities, where they literally swarm. Were it to our purpose we could write pages of these petty and cunning robberies of which they are guilty. A very common sight is, when a coolie is going through the streets with a basket of rice on his head, to see the crows swoop down and fill their mouths with the rice, and be off again before the man knows their intention, or has time even to turn around. It must have been some such sight as this in ancient Egypt, familiar to Pharaoh’s baker, that caused him to dream of the birds eating the bread out of the basket that he carried on his head, and that foreshadowed the dire results to himself. Those “birds” must have been “crows” of the Rangoon species.
I could not wait long that first morning in Rangoon, and the first of a new year, to get out into the streets astir with human life. I took my first impression of many specimens of humanity that passed in view. While the common distinctions in dress, complexion, manners, and occupations, which mean so much when you come to know their significance, were not recognized in this first view of the people, I did get a very definite impression of two classes—one well formed and well fed, and the other class, those poor weaklings, mostly of the depressed peoples of India, who migrate to Burma. Of the latter, I wrote at the time to friends in America, that they were specimens of the human race that had about run their course, and must die away from sheer weakness. Later conclusions do not differ materially from this first decision. But I did learn later that the fine-looking people of strong physique were Burmese, and that the province of Burma, generally, has very few peoples of any race that compare in feebleness with some of the immigrants from India that flock into the cities, such as Rangoon. It is chiefly what the traveler sees in coast towns like Rangoon, which leads so many transient passers-by to wrong conclusions concerning Oriental countries. In Rangoon, many other peoples are more in evidence than the Burmese.
After that early walk and breakfast, which came about ten o’clock, the usual time, I met with Rev. Mr. Warner, and took in charge the affairs of our mission. It is a simple thing for a preacher to go from one pastoral charge to another in America, in every respect very much like the Church and community he has always served; but it is entirely different to go to a distant and unfamiliar country, and take up work essentially different from anything you ever had to do with before. Then, at home it is the custom for each man to be occupied with some one specific work and its obligations; but on the mission-field, such as Burma has been until now, there is such a variety of interests as loads every missionary with the work that ought to be distributed between two or three. That morning I learned that we had an English Church in Rangoon which supported its own pastor; an English school that numbered nearly two hundred pupils, and an Orphanage for the poor Eurasians and Anglo-Indian children. There was also a work among the seamen that visited the port. A woman’s workshop had been founded some time before for helping the poor Eurasian, and other women, to earn a living with the needle. There was also preaching going on among the Tamils and Telegus, some converts and a fair day-school being conducted among them. This work was mostly in Rangoon; but some preaching was done in the villages round about, and one exhorter was holding a little congregation of Tamils at Toungoo, one hundred and sixty miles north from Rangoon. A further account of Methodism will be given later, and it is only necessary here to tell how the work appeared to me that morning when I began my labors in Burma.
