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blind fighting-cock, no longer fit for the ring : this, cooked with 

 rice and native vegetables served me for three days ; fortunately I 

 was not inclined to eat much, neither was the dish calculated to 

 promote my appetite. Numerous visitors came to see me more from 

 curiosity than sympathy, and I gained much information — valuable 

 information — from them. It appears that when a husband is ab- 

 sent whose turn it is for picket duty, the wife has to take his place, 

 and in cases where the party is not a married man, a male or 

 female relation is given as a substitute. 



311. Friday, 20th February 18 74.— Thermometer, 72° at 6 

 a.m. ; a fine, bright sunny morning. I was still confined to my 

 house. 



312. Saturday, 21st February 1874. — Thermometer, 71° at 

 6 a.m. ; slight shower of rain overnight : heavy fog up to 10 a.m., 

 which penetrated my room, the walling merely being of bamboo - 

 matting, and in a very dilapidated state. In the forenoon, I took a 

 stroll to the end of the town, and with the permission of the royal 

 Hpoongyee, extracted a soda-water bottle full of juice from a 

 Ficus elastica growing at the back of the royal monastery. Half 

 of the exudation I condensed by direct exposure to the sun, and 

 the remainder, — with an equal bulk of water, — I consolidated by 

 evaporation over a slow fire in an iron vessel. Besides these 

 two systems, which are practised by the Kakhyens, they adopt 

 two other processes, — one is to allow the milk to coagulate 

 as it exudes from the tree, winding the dried substance into a 

 ball ; and the other is to pour the milk in a very thin layer — not 

 thicker than the eighth of an inch — on a fine mat placed out in 

 the sun, and surrounded by a moulding of clay an inch high ; this 

 soon coalesces, and is then removed, and likewise made into a 

 ball. I had endeavoured to find out the process adopted by Mr. 

 Henri, to utilize caoutchouc in the form of a cement for repairing 

 the gutta-percha tubing of his pumps, but no reliable information 

 could be obtained. One account was that he boiled ten tickals 

 of caoutchouc with two and-a-half tickals of kunnion oil, but this is 

 most improbable. Hearing that a party of thirty-three Singphos 

 from the amber mines had arrived with their yearly tribute, con- 

 sisting of four pair of elephant tusks, a pair of amber idols, five 

 spears, some slaves, a stuffed musk-deer, and two golden cocks, I 

 requested to be allowed to see the last two named, which the 

 Governor very kindly sent over. The golden cock, I found, was 

 a pheasant, closely resembling in plumage our European golden 

 pheasant. This bird is considered exceedingly rare, and not found 

 beyond the limits of the mountains to the extreme north of the 

 Pendwine district, lat. 26°: neither is the musk-deer met with fur- 



