Pebiuary 12, 189:. ] 
JOURXAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
120 
open, and slept the sleep of healthy fatigue till the sudden daylight 
aroused us in the morning. 
Toungoo is a garrison town with a wing of British and another 
of Indian troops officered by Englishmen, and has splendid 
airy and roomy wooden barracks, well sheltered by magnificent 
Mango and Peepul trees, so that the European colony is of 
respectable dimensions, and affords good and pleasant society. 
Very chaiacteristic of the country is what I must call, for want 
of a better term, its ecclesiastical architecture. Pagodas are as 
the houses of the brethren are not only the homes of those who 
devote their entire lives to pious meditation and religious exercises, 
but the schools of the country. I could say much of this system 
but my time is too short, and I must content myself with a reference 
to the peculiar architecture of these remarkable and very numerous 
buddings. They are generally buried in trees and approached by 
flights of steps, flanked by remarkably quaint representations of 
dragons, serpents, and sometimes of evil spirits or nats, in whose 
omnipresence the Burmese have unbounded belief. The main 
Fig. 25.—a BURMESE BUNGALOW. 
Kumerous a-s churches in our country, and are all of the same 
general form, though in miniature, as the great Schway Dagon of 
Kangoon. which I have described at some length. 
Equally interesting are the hypoongyee kyrungs, or houses of 
the Burmese brethren. The aim of the Buddhist religion is to 
make every man a hypoongyee or priest (again I use the word for 
want of a better), and to promote a life of religious meditation, by 
which he shall attain to a degree of self-abstraction and piety which 
shall enable him, in the next migration of his soul, to lise to a 
liigher grade of being ; for if he fail in this he is doomed to 
retrograde, and to become a lower animal again. Hence, every 
male Burman becomes, if only for a short time, a hypoongyee, and 
building is always supported on teak upright posts, so that there is 
an open space beneath it. From the first floor it lises, tier upon 
tier, the whole built in teak wood, and often from floor to loftiest 
pinnacle adorned with carvings of very exquisite workmanship. 
Within is always a large temple with its images of Buddha and the 
paraphernalia of the Buddhist service, and alongside of this the 
dormitory of the hypoongyees and their often extensive library of 
sacred literature, written upon prepared slips of Palm leaf. The 
brethren are always courteous and dignified, and in every instance 
they threw open all parts of their establishment to our inspec¬ 
tion, guiding us themselves and dismissing us with the polite 
Burmese silute, “Now you can go. Come again,” Once some- 
