January 7th.—We danced—I danced with ladies in Gainsborough hats, their feathers tickling my eye, in pork pie hats, and Watteaus, and picture hats like sparrows' nests; and there were little dumpy ladies and tall, stately, Junos, i.e., compared with Eastern women. And it was so funny to see men in suits of blue serge, tweeds, or tussore silk, whirling round with ladies in muslins of every lovely colour. If the men had only worn bowlers and smoked cigars, how it would have taken me back to student days in Antwerp at Carnival time, not so jolly of course, but very different from anything at home. And how stately are the club-rooms—really they are well off these relations of ours "Out East"—don't believe their groans altogether! it is hot now, they say, but look at the fun they have, especially ladies. There are ladies' billiard-rooms, card-rooms, music-rooms, reading-rooms inside, and outside, lawns and flowers and attendants to fetch and carry, and swains to admire them, and they have latest dresses, dances, balls, riding, tennis all the time, and Royalties and Viceroys at intervals. Compare this to the humdrum life of our women in Scotland with their brothers and cousins, "A wede awa" to the uttermost ends of the Empire, and never a Viceroy or Royalty of any description to show above their level horizon—that is intolerable.

Then home to dinner, very full of interest and wonder at the sights of the day, and scribbled the above dance scene, and dressed and walked over the way in the soft dust in the soft moonlight and dined with friends and relations, and talked in the dark teak-wood bungalow of other friends and relations and home things, and looked at curios and sketches; and little lizards looked out at us from the walls, and a huge piebald fellow up in the shadows of the wooden roof, a foot and a half long if an inch, a Chuck-Tu, didn't frighten our hosts in the least! Then across the strip of moonlit, to sleep my lone, under the hospitable teak roof-trees of "a Binning!"

Here there seems to be a hiatus in these notes of mine—it is rather a jump from the British India steamer to a Gymkhana dance? But such a break gives relief to the mind, and has sometimes even a dramatic effect. I have twice observed such breaks in journals; the first in Edinburgh, in the journal of the City Clerk. The break occurs when the Provost and Clerk lay cold on Floddon Field, and the entries are taken up in a new hand with a minute which begins—"Owing to a rumour of a disaster in the south." The second break, I saw the other day in the Madras records. It occured when the French called at Fort George in 1746. The break in my journal is simply the result of yesterday being so full of interest that I did not write up till this forenoon, after a pause for rest and refreshment.

So to hark back. The landing at Rangoon and coming up the river was the best part of the journey from Madras. For descriptions of coming up the Rangoon river see other writers. G. and I had been kept awake for several nights by the natives[20] and finally had to shut our port and snatched an hour or two of sleep without air so as to be without noise,—this after various expeditions to try and quiet the beasts outside, but nothing but drowning would have stopped their horrid exuberance.

[20]

Native in Burmah stands for native of India, not a Burman.

The peace that you feel in Iona seemed to lie over the country as we came up the Rangoon river.

The Golden Pagoda stands up very simply and beautifully above the flat country, and beneath it palms and ship's masts look very lowly things indeed. It seems a perfect conductor of thought from earth to sky; the gentle concave curves of its sides are more natural lines of repose than those of our challenging spires. I had been prepared for little—pictures and photographs have dwarfed the thing—they do not give the firmness and delicacy in form and the sentiment that it inspires. It is like the Burmans religion; there's a sense of happiness in the way its wide gold base amongst nestling green palms and foliage of trees gradually contracts till the point rises quietly against the blue and fleecy clouds, where the glint of gold and flash from jewels seems to unite heaven and earth.