Janaar7 JO, ISOl. ] 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER 
89 
bodies hewn in pieces, were depicted with a very unpleasant 
realism. The greatest vivacity is imparted to the scene by numbers 
of people of v.arious tribes and in manifold gay costumes dotted 
about the enclosure, passing in and out of the temples, and of 
devotees pacing round the pagoda with outstretched hands and 
fingers joined at the tips, repeating prayers or passages from the 
•sacred books of Buddhism. Here is a group of Hypoongyies in 
yellow silken robes and with shaven heads ; here a relicjiense in 
white dress, very ugly, her ugliness accentuated by her shaven 
<crown ; here again a fortune teller, sitting on his mat with his 
solemn mystery whi^h was overpowering, and which stimulated 
thi imagination in the highest degree. At the second we saw it 
in the full blaze of tropical day, when every detail of its strange 
architecture was revealed to us, and the great golden spire stood 
out in dazzling brightness against a cloudless sky of deepest blue. 
We left Rangoon on Monday, December Dth, at G.30 a.m., by rail 
for Toungoo, the goal of our long travel. The first two or three 
hours take us through rich tracts of Paddy, intermingled with 
unreclaimed jungle, in vhich huge clumps of feathery Bamboos 
50 or GO feet high (the most marvellously graceful of all created 
properties around him—a desk with a slate on it on which he draws 
his cabalistic signs, a life sized drawing of an outstretched hand 
«n which are traced the various lines familiar to those who believe 
in palmistry, a few rude figures of dragons and familiar spirits, 
and so forth—surrounded by a crowd of people squatting on their 
heels, and absorbed in the interest of his predictions ; here, once 
more, a devotee sitting on his mat and droning out his devotions 
in a nasal sing-song tone. The whole scene is so wholly unlike 
anything we had ever seen in Europe, and of such extreme in¬ 
terest, that I regard our two visits to the Schway Dagon Pagoda as 
among the most memorable events of our life. At the first we 
beheld it under the full moon, and its carved roofs and doorways, 
its innumerable quaint images, its countless calm-faced Buddhas, 
and its surroundings of glorious vegetation were invested with a 
plants, and one of the most useful to mankind) and the scarcely 
less beautiful Calami or Rattan Canes are conspicuous. Paddy is, 
of course, the growing crop o^ which rice is the final fruit, and rice 
is the mainstay and chief food of the almost countless millions of 
the east. When he rises in the morning the native of India, Ceylon, 
or Burma eats his rice, he and his family sitting round the common 
bowl, guiltless of plate, or knife and fork. He toils as a labourer, 
or tills the field, or irrigates its crops, or pursues whatever be his 
vocation in life with unceasing industry till the sun is sinking 
towards the west, and then only does he again break his fast, and 
again his food is rice, perhaps flavoured with a little curry. 
On the innumerable uses of the Bamboo whole essays have 
been written. I need only remind you that it is the principal 
house-building material in the east ; that it forms the supports and 
