"When you take into consideration the fact that Rangoon has a system of parks and parkways with beautiful shade trees, choice flowers, and crystal lakes, artificial and natural, dotted about them, and that it provides breathing spaces for people living in congested districts, you cannot but form a good idea of the aliveness of the municipal corporation. A good horse-carriage service, now being rapidly superseded by the trolley, makes transportation easy and cheap. The city has provided splendid schools and playgrounds. Yet sixty years ago Rangoon was a mere fishing village."
One item from Mr. Kipling's picture of Rangoon referred to the elephants hauling teakwood in "the slushy, squdgy creek." Well, they are still at it, working with wonderful precision and an apparent sense of responsibility. They don't try to soldier, never get in one another's way or mixed up with the machinery, no matter how cramped they may be for room.
Some of them take the teak logs which have been floated down the river and tow them ashore. Then they drag them to the sawmills, either rolling them with one foot while they walk on three, pushing them with their tusks, or pulling them with a chain attached to a breast strap.
Inside the mill an elephant selects a log, picks it out with his tusks, kicks it up to the saw with his toes, then tying his trunk in a kind of knot around the log, holds it against the teeth of the saw while it is made into boards, pushing aside the outside slabs as they are cut off and adjusting the log to make boards of the proper thickness.
Then he piles the boards up neatly, standing off to examine the effect, and if he finds a board out of line carefully adjusting it. Sometimes a pair of elephants working together exchange peculiar grunts, as if they were giving and receiving directions.
They are used in Burma for various purposes. The young calves are ridden like horses, with a soft pad and stirrups. They are found especially valuable in bad country, and may be ridden fifty or sixty miles a day. A tap on the side of the head, a slight pressure of the knee, or a word whispered in the ear is all that is required to guide them.
It is not at all a difficult matter for an elephant in prime condition to outrun a fast horse, but they cannot jump. A deep ditch only six or seven feet wide is impassable to them.
Working elephants are in their prime when they are twenty-five years old. They are expensive to feed, it being declared in Rangoon that an elephant eats a quarter of his weight in feed every day. An average day's food for one is certainly eight hundred pounds.
Socially Burma is unlike other Oriental countries. Men and women—even young men and women—walk together in the streets and mingle in social gatherings. Courtship always precedes the marriage.
The Burmans are ardent lovers, and when a young man and woman find that their parents do not approve of the match they usually repair to the woods and return after a day or two as man and wife, sure of parental forgiveness. Marriage among Burmans is an extremely simple affair. The only ceremony performed is the eating together out of the same bowl of rice. Usually a feast is given to the relatives and friends of the families concerned. No sacrifices are offered, no services are performed.