92 A COLLECTING TRIP 
Gale’s Hotel. 
Mandalay, December 14, 1906. 
Dear Pa : 
Just a few lines to tell you how often we think 
of you all, especially as Christmas is now coming on. 
Ros. is getting to be a very good traveler and is very 
interested in all she sees. She is even getting to taste 
some of the native cooked food we get up here and in 
like places. All last week it was swillish curry with 
cocoanut gratings, bits of eggs hard boiled — not al- 
ways fresh — onions, Bombay ducks and chutney. All 
this is mixed up on your plate with rice and ‘‘ghi,’’ 
which is clarified butter, generally rancid, and eaten 
with a spoon. Personally, being not over fastidious, 
I find it most excellent. You get no meat here as we 
have it at home, chops or roasts. They do not know 
how to broil and their ovens are too small to roast 
in, so everything is hashed up, mixed with garlic and 
various other ingredients, and these made up into a 
ball and fried in deep ‘‘ghi.’’ Very good, if you do 
not think of what you are eating. Ros does. But we 
get good toast everywhere and good eggs, if you make 
them poach them, and fine fish near rivers or at sea- 
ports and so we do quite well. We are taking stacks 
of photographs, which are coming out finely; we have 
had them developed as we go along, but we had no 
time to get any printed, excepting at Rangoon; these 
we will get on our return and send some to you. I 
hope those of the elephants working in the teak yards 
and those of the Shwe Dagon pagoda and its sur- 
rounding shrines will come out well. Read my book 
on Burma, which I left at your house with a few other 
things, if I remember correctly ; this will tell you more 
