Bush- Quails. 109 



work to try and burn the grass, as a good 

 breeze was blowing; but after an hour 

 thus wasted, we had to abandon the 

 attempt. The fire would not spread ; the 

 grass was nearly dry it had lost, I mean, 

 all greenness, and nearly all natural mois- 

 ture but it had rained incessantly for the 

 previous three days and nights and was 

 still drizzling, and everything was too 

 sodden to take fire. Naturally I was not 

 going to move until I did get a specimen, 

 so my whole camp, soldiers and sailors 

 (we had a lot of boatmen), camp followers, 

 and. all the inhabitants of the village were 

 turned out. First we tried cutting, but 

 it soon became obvious that this would 

 be too long a job. So we set to work to 

 divide off the expanse into a number of 

 irregularly-sized patches, and this the con- 

 figuration of the ground, with its several 

 ridges, along the crests of which the grass 

 grew comparatively thinly, greatly facili- 

 tated. Although we had fully one hun- 

 dred men working with their heavy 

 hatchet-swords (daks, as the Burmese 

 call them), and working, as only these 

 Easterns can, at trace cutting, it was some 

 hours before we had got the ground into 

 shape, and fully three o'clock before beat- 

 ing commenced. At dusk, by dint of our 



