Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _Julius Smith_]
[Illustration]
_Ten Years
in Burma_
_By
REV. JULIUS SMITH_
_CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & PYE
NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS_
_COPYRIGHT
1902 BY
JENNINGS
& PYE_
[Illustration]
_ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED_
_PREFACE_
The following account of life in Burma has been written to make the
country and its people better known in America. At this time, when the
United States has come into possession of large and important tropical
lands, there is much quickening of interest in all such countries.
Burma is much like the Philippine Islands in climate, and there is
great racial similarity between the Burmese race and the Tagals.
But I have written chiefly to record the experiences and observations
of a missionary in a great and important mission-field, which is not so
well known in the home land as it deserves to be. My purpose has been
to make the condition of missionary life, and much of other life, real
to the reader, who has had no experience in a tropical country. It is
hoped that this presentation of facts will add to missionary knowledge,
and secure a better acquaintance with the races of Asia and the forces
of civilization that are making for the uplift of Asiatic peoples.
In writing of mission work in Burma, I have given special prominence
to that under the control of the Methodist Episcopal Church. There has
been no printed account of this mission for the twenty-two years of its
history, and it seems well to give some permanent form to the record
of that which has been undertaken by our little band of missionaries in
that field.
In writing of races, social life, and government, I have, of course,
written of that which is seen through a missionary’s eyes. It so
happens that I have had a great deal to do with people of various
nationalities, in relations not directly of a missionary character.
This has given me many opportunities to observe as a man, regardless
of my calling. In all respects I have tried to be fair and accurate. I
have always cherished a fellow-feeling with men whose labors brought
them to Asia, and my sympathies have been with all such in honorable
callings. It has been my purpose to reflect the conditions of life
with which they are surrounded. There has been much excluded that I
would gladly have recorded, if the limit of this book had allowed
the additional facts. Some incompleteness of statement has been
unavoidable, as I could not verify the details at the time and place
of writing. Ten years is a short time to study great questions in the
East, and to form conclusions on the greatest of them; but I trust
that enough of well-digested facts has been told in this book to
give the student of missions and mission lands an inside view of the
questions discussed. For such defects as are due to the limitations of
the author’s ability to gather or to present facts in a satisfactory
manner, I must trust to the generous sentiments of the reader.
JULIUS SMITH.
_TABLE OF CONTENTS_
PAGE
I. FROM AMERICA TO BURMA, 13
II. FIRST YEAR IN BURMA, 34
III. A YEAR OF CHANGES, 57
IV. THE PHYSICAL FEATURES OF BURMA, 70
V. THE CITY OF RANGOON, 87
VI. EUROPEANS, ANGLO-INDIANS, EURASIANS, 109
VII. CHARACTERISTICS OF RACES OF BURMA, 122
VIII. BUDDHISM, 139
IX. BUDDHISM; HOW MAINTAINED, 153
X. BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY CONTRASTED, 169
XI. RIPENED FRUIT OF NON-CHRISTIAN FAITHS, 180
XII. OUTLINE OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS, BURMA, 201
XIII. METHODIST EPISCOPAL MISSION, BURMA, 216
XIV. PREACHING IN FOUR ASIATIC LANGUAGES, 236
XV. A UNIQUE ENTERPRISE, 263
XVI. THE PRESENT SITUATION IN MISSIONS, 293
XVII. BENEFITS OF BRITISH RULE IN SOUTHERN ASIA, 308
[Illustration]
_LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_
PAGE
1. JULIUS SMITH, _Frontispiece_.
2. SWAY DAGON PAGODA, 27
3. METHODIST CHURCH, RANGOON, 37
4. NATIVES OF BURMA, 43
5. PADDY-BOAT, 75
6. THE ELEPHANT AT WORK, 83
7. THE NEW PUBLIC OFFICES, RANGOON, 93
8. THE MOSQUE, RANGOON, 99
9. ENTRANCE OF SWAY DAGON PAGODA, 103
10. ROYAL LAKES AT EVENTIDE, RANGOON, 107
11. A BURMESE FAMILY, 127
12. SHRINE, SWAY DAGON PAGODA, 143
13. FRONT OF A GAUTAMA TEMPLE, 149
14. BUDDHIST MONK AND ATTENDANT, 157
15. FUNERAL PYRE OF A BURMESE PRIEST, 163
16. FESTIVITIES AT A POUNGYI’S CREMATION, 199
17. METHODIST GIRLS’ SCHOOL, RANGOON, 219
18. CHARLOTTE O’NEAL INSTITUTE, RANGOON, 223
19. LARGE IMAGE AT PEGU, 255
20. MISS PERKINS AND GROUP OF GIRLS AT THANDAUNG, 275
21. FIRST PERMANENT BUILDING ON THANDAUNG, 283
22. BURMESE FESTIVAL CART, 315
[Illustration]
_Ten Years
in Burma_
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
From America to Burma
The Church of Jesus Christ has just closed its first century of
missionary effort within modern times. The nineteenth century began
with only a few heroic spirits urging the Church to awake to its
responsibility of giving the gospel to the Christless nations.
The century has just closed with a steadily increasing army of
missionaries, who are determined to give the gospel to every man in
his own tongue at the earliest possible day, while the whole Church
is beginning to feel the missionary impulse, so far at least, that an
increasing multitude are eager to hear of mission lands, the condition
of the peoples without Christ, the victories of the gospel, and to have
some share in its triumph.
Adoniram Judson, the great missionary hero, enrolled the land of Burma
in the list of great mission-fields. He began his labors in Burma
during the second decade of the century. The following pages are
written as a report of missionary labors and observations in that land
in the closing ten years of the century.
How the writer came to be a missionary, and to be honored with an
appointment to Burma, may warrant a brief statement. In almost all
life’s important steps, individual influence proves the determining
factor. This is true in my call to the mission-field. In 1867, when
only ten years of age, living on my father’s farm in Andrew County,
Mo., I heard a Methodist preacher make a plea for the heathen world. I
have never been able to recall his name, that being the only time he
ever preached in that place, which was a schoolhouse on my father’s
farm. The sermon made a profound impression on me, and I decided to
give half of my little fortune of one dollar, saved from pennies,
to the cause of missions, with pleadings for which he so warmed our
hearts and moved our eyes to tears. Later experiences have shown that
missionary sermon to have been the most potential influence of my
childhood or youth in determining what I should be in after years. The
experience itself seemed to die away for a term of years, due, I think,
to the fact that I had little religious training and no missionary
information during youth. The reawakening of missionary interest came
in 1880, when in college in the Iowa Wesleyan University I heard
William Taylor tell of his missionary labors in many lands. Had I then
been near the close of my college course, instead of at its beginning,
I would have volunteered to go to his mission in South America. Seven
or eight years went by, and I was in Garrett Biblical Institute. At
that time Bishop Thoburn delivered a series of thrilling missionary
addresses to the school. I now think, though without being clearly
conscious of it, that from that time I was called to go to India. In
1889, I was pastor of the Arlington Methodist Church in Kansas City,
Mo., and so became one of the entertainers of the Missionary Committee
that met in the city that year. In listening to the missionary
addresses for ten days, and more especially in conversation with Dr.
Oldham, who was present, being commissioned by Bishop Thoburn to
secure re-enforcements for India, the whole question whether my wife
and I should offer ourselves to the Missionary Society for work in
the foreign field came up for final settlement. I sought the counsel
of Bishop Ninde, who had once been to India, and whose kindly manner
always invited confidences of this sort. He agreed to come and spend
a day with us, two months later, which he did, and as a result of his
counsel and advice, we decided to offer to go to India as missionaries.
The offer was promptly accepted, and from that time we laid our plans
to leave for our new field of work the following fall. It has always
been an inspiring memory to recall the steps by which we were led to
let go of America and set our faces toward Asia, and the personal
agencies that led us to this decision.
There was another consideration which had great weight in our choice
of the foreign mission-field. At home there are men ready for all
places. In the foreign mission-fields, especially in Southern Asia,
to which we were drawn, there are several places for every man. Here
any one of a dozen valuable men can be had for any important charge.
On the mission-fields there are most important posts that call in
vain for re-enforcements. At home supplies can be had to meet any
emergency within a very short time; but on the mission-field we often
must wait years for the right man. I left Kansas City in the morning,
and my successor, a very worthy and successful man, arrived in the
evening of the same day. But out in Burma I have pleaded for years for
one man to re-enforce the mission. The Arlington Church, which I was
serving, was then and is now a very enjoyable pastorate--one in which
the people, always cherish their pastor, and better, where they have
from the founding of the Church cordially supported every effort for
the salvation of men. The decision to leave that Church to go half way
round the world to a people I had never seen, was largely due to the
fact that we were needed most on this picket-line of missions, and good
men, who for any reason could not go to the foreign fields, could be
found to take up promptly the work I laid down at home.
The farewells in Kansas City were of the cheerful and happy kind that
send missionaries on their way to their peculiar missions strong in
heart. Arlington Church spoke its own farewell in a reception to their
pastor and his family, while Grand Avenue Church, the Methodists
of Kansas City, followed with a general reception to the outgoing
missionaries. This general gathering was under the direction of the
pastor, Dr. Jesse Bowman Young, and Dr. O. M. Stewart, the presiding
elder. The latter sounded the note of cheerfulness for the farewell.
He said, “Let us have nothing of a funeral sort about this reception.”
We have always thanked him for the cheerful and hopeful tone which
ran all through the meeting. Dr. Young was of the same spirit, and
in his address, which at one moment bordered on the emotional at
the thought of a long parting from those to whom he had been one of
the best of friends, recovered himself by saying, “If you discover
anything suspicious in my eyes, charge it up to the hayfever.” These
good brethren did more than they knew to set a standard of joyful
anticipation on the part of the Church and the outgoing missionaries in
the honorable service to which they were called, that toned up their
courage when facing the actual separation from home ties. This was of
very great value to us who were leaving a very enjoyable pastorate, a
native land in which we had taken deep root, and most of all, an aged
father and mother.
We left Kansas City on September 3, 1890, and after a little over two
months spent in resting and arranging our affairs, we sailed from New
York for Liverpool on November 12th. The closing hours in New York were
very different from those in Kansas City, and made it appear very real
to us that we were being plucked up from the home land and transplanted
to a foreign country. We had no acquaintances at all in New York,
except one of the Missionary Secretaries, who had visited us in Kansas
City. He and his associates were as kind as they could be; but then as
now, they were men worked beyond their strength with the burdens of
business there is upon them, and at that particular time were hurried
to get off to Boston, to the annual Missionary Committee meeting, and
they had to tell us a hasty farewell at the Mission Rooms, and leave us
to go alone to the ship. While our sailing was more lonely than that of
most missionaries, yet it is now the custom to make very little out of
the departure of men and women to mission-fields, however distant. The
older missionaries contrast this formal dispatch of recruits with the
custom of forty years ago, when men still in active service, were first
sent out. Then it was the plan to have the new missionaries gathered
in one or more churches, and after speeches and exchange of good-will
all around, to send them forth with the feeling that their outgoing on
this great mission was a matter of moment to the whole Church. It is
presumable that custom may change in this matter from time to time, and
especially as the number and frequency of the departure of missionaries
increase; but it is certain that the departure of missionaries to our
distant fields on this, the highest mission of the Church, can not be
made less of than it has been in recent years.
We sailed on the steamship _City of New York_, the largest and swiftest
ship then afloat. She loosed her moorings at five o’clock in the
morning of November 12th. It was a gloomy morning with a cold rain,
and though I was on deck to note any objects of interest amidst the
gloom, nothing at all of importance was in view, save the Statue of
Liberty holding its light aloft in the harbor. No departure from the
shores of the home-land could have been less cheering and romantic.
But as the great ship made her way out to sea, there was a peculiar
satisfaction in the feeling that came over us, that we were actually on
our way to Burma. Some time before sailing, it had been decided that
we would go there, making headquarters at Rangoon, the capital of that
province of the Indian Empire.
Our voyage across the Atlantic was uneventful for the most part, but
not uninteresting. On a great ship one has a good opportunity to study
his fellow-passengers. One among our company has since become an
international character, and even then had become widely known. This
personage was none other than Paul Kruger, President, then and since,
of the Transvaal Republic. We then thought of Majuba Hill and its
consequences, but could not foresee that this son of the African velt
would, before ten years had passed, throw so large a part of the world
into turmoil and lead in a great war. I was impressed with his strong
leonine features, and the less heroic fact that he was one of the first
among the passengers to yield to the power of a rough sea.
Four days out we ran into a great storm that lasted nearly two days. Up
to that time we were making a quick passage, but the wind and waves
soon destroyed all hopes of making a high record. The storm was worst
at midnight, and as we were being rolled until it was hardly possible
to remain in our berths, the ammonia pipes broke and flooded the lower
cabins with gas. Our cabin was located near that part of the ship where
the trouble occurred, but no one was seriously injured. A similar thing
recently happened on the same ship in a storm on the Atlantic, and
again the suffocating gas spread through the ship with one fatality and
a number of prostrations.
Landing at Liverpool, we went to London for ten days, returning to the
former place to take the first ship direct for Rangoon. There are two
general routes from English ports to points in India. By one you travel
across the continent, and usually take ship at some Mediterranean port,
and sail to Bombay. By the other you sail via Gibraltar, and so go by
sea all the way. Our route was the latter course, and at the time we
went out there was only one line of steamers, the Patrick Henderson,
direct from English ports to Rangoon. We took passage on a new vessel,
the steamship _Pegu_, making its third voyage. “What a strange name for
a ship!” we said. We soon learned that the name was taken from an old,
ruined city of Burma, and that all the company’s steamers bear the name
of some city, ancient or modern, in the land of Burma. So, at the very
docks, as we started Eastward, we met a name suggestive of the ancient
history of the land of our future labors. In the appointments of the
steamer we were much impressed with the fact that we had no arrangement
for heating the vessel, but every plan for thorough ventilation. We
found it very cold on board until we passed the Suez Canal. Otherwise
the appointments were every way satisfactory, and the fare reasonable.
This good ship made but one voyage more under its Scotch ownership.
It was then sold to the Spaniards and renamed the _Alicante_. This
circumstance became of much interest to us at a later date, when
this ship was the first to be loaded with defeated Spanish troops at
Santiago.
The outward voyage had its many objects of interest to the passengers
going out for the first time. We sailed in plain view of the Portuguese
and Spanish coasts, but were disappointed in passing Gibraltar at
night. The next day, however, we were charmed with a magnificent view
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Southern Spain, as they lifted their
snowy heights into cloudless skies, and their vineclad slopes dropped
away to the level of the sea. For nearly a whole day we sailed close by
the picturesque shores of Sardinia. Here we noted a singular confusion
of the compass by reason of being magnetized by the land. As the good
ship swung off from the southern cape of the island, it made two great
curves to correct the erratic state of the compass. We entered the
harbor of Naples in the full floodlight of a Mediterranean noon. The
afternoon was spent in the city. Our party was not favorably impressed
with the gay people in their holiday attire. It seems they have many
holidays of the like kind. In the evening we sailed southward; and
as darkness closed around us, distant Vesuvius sent its fiery glow
upward on the black mass of overhanging cloud, making a lurid night
scene. In the morning we woke in plain view of the great volcanic cone
of Stromboli, rising out of the sea. We were near the island, which
seems to have no land except the volcano itself; yet houses nestle
here and there around its base. What a choice for a home--at the base
of an actual volcano! The weather was perfect as we sailed through the
Straits of Messina, but great Mount Ætna, which we hoped to see, was
hid in clouds.
The second stop in our journey was at Port Said. The Suez Canal is the
gateway of the nations. Port Said is its northern entrance. It is under
international control, and hence its government is less responsible
than that of almost any other city. It is one of the most wicked cities
of the world. Representatives of all races are congregated there. It
is not our purpose to describe this city, but to point out that here
for the first time we had a glimpse of the Orient. The fellaheen of
Egypt loaded our ship with coal, carrying great baskets on their heads.
We arrived in the night, and the coaling began almost immediately. My
wife and I got out of our cabin before day to go on deck and see these
people at work by the light of torches. A strange, weird sight it was
to Western eyes; and their shouting in strange tongues emphasized the
fact that we had indeed come to a strange land.
The Suez Canal is the natural dividing-line between the Western and the
Eastern civilizations, between the cold Northlands and the perpetually
tropical countries of Southern Asia. Looking westward and northward,
you find energy put to practical account; looking eastward, you find
lethargy and life no more aggressive that it must be to keep peoples
as they have been for a thousand years. Westward you greet progress,
but Eastward life has been stagnated for ages, and only stirs as it is
acted upon from the West. Westward you have an increasing degree of
prosperity and material comforts and advantages of modern civilization,
but Eastward you have such poverty among the millions as can not be
conceived by people more favored. Westward you have civilizations
never content with present attainment; but Eastward you have peoples
whose highest ideals are only to be and to do what their fathers were
and did before them. The West seeks to produce new things, but the
East condemns all improvement for no other reason than that it is new.
All this, and much more, is suggested by the Suez Canal, from which
you plunge downward into Asiatic civilization. Climatically you are
henceforth to know only the tropics, a climate, so far as Southern
Asia is concerned, that you will come to know henceforth as dividing
the year into two seasons, “Three months very hot, and nine months
very much hotter.” At Port Said you will be informed of the change
that is just ahead of you. Whatever you may have bought in New York
or London, you will need one more article of dress at Port Said--a
helmet, to protect your head from the tropical sun. You will never see
a day in Southern Asia in which you can go forth in the noonday sun
with an ordinary hat, or without a helmet, except at your peril; and
most of the time you will wear that protection for your head from early
morning until five in the evening, or later. You will have another
indication that you are going down into the tropics. If you have made
your journey, as we did, in the colder months, the sunniest place on
the deck has been the most comfortable until you arrive at Port Said;
but there they raise double canvas over the whole ship, and from that
on, as long as you go to and fro in the tropical seas, you will never
travel a league by sea that you do not have that same double canvas
above you when the sun is in the heavens. No wonder the Suez Canal
means so much besides commerce or travel to all who have passed through
it to Southern Asia!
Through the fifteen hundred miles of the Red Sea we took our way. Then
the Gulf of Aden was traversed, and next through the Arabian Sea our
good ship bore us on our journey. The heat, like very hot summer at
home, was upon us, though we were out at sea in December. Coming on
deck one morning before other passengers were astir, I was delighted
to see the green hills of Ceylon a few miles to our left. We had
rounded the island in the night. The decks had been scrubbed in the
early morning, as usual; the ocean was smooth, and the tropical sun
flooded sea and land, while the sweetest odor of spices filled the air.
At once I thought of “Ceylon’s spicy breezes,” but I suddenly noted
that the wind was _toward the shore_, which lay some miles away, and
then I was prepared for the sentiment of the chief steward who had
sprinkled spices out of the ship stores over the wet deck to please the
passengers’ sense of smell as they came forth to give their morning
greetings to this emerald isle of the Indian Ocean. In rounding Ceylon
we reached our lowest latitude, six degrees north. We were still six
days’ sail from Burma, and our course took us nearly northeast from
this point. The entire voyage from the Suez Canal to Burma was made
under cloudless skies and through calm waters. A day from Rangoon we
passed near the beautiful little Cocoa Islands, while the Andamans
showed above the horizon far to the southward. It is remarkable how
much interest there is among passengers when a ship is sighted, or
land appears on a long voyage. These Cocoa Islands are important as
being guides to vessels homeward or outward bound, and they mark the
line between the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Martahan. An important
lighthouse has been maintained there for the past fifty years. The
Andamans are shrouded in gloomy mystery, due to the fact that they are
used as a penal colony of criminals transported from India. On the
31st of December, 1890, after passing several light-ships, we came,
about noon, in sight of the low-lying shores of Burma. We had been
thirty-five days from Liverpool, and were getting weary of the sea, to
say nothing of our curiosity to land in a country new to us. But no
land could be less interesting than this shore-line of Burma, first
sighted on coming in from the sea. It lies just above the sea-level,
and besides a fringe of very small shrubbery, and here and there a
cocoanut palm-tree, it is absolutely expressionless. After lying at
anchor for three hours at the mouth of the Rangoon River, waiting for
the incoming tide, we began the last twenty miles of our journey up the
broad river to the city of Rangoon.
The passengers were made up mostly of people who were returning to
Burma after a furlough in England. The anticipation of friendly
greetings and the appearance of every familiar object along the river
created a quiver of pleasant excitement among them. Our missionary
party were almost the only ones who had not special friends in Rangoon
to meet them.
[Illustration: SWAY DAGON PAGODA]
Presently all eyes were turned up the river as the second officer
called out, “There is the Great Pagoda.” Yes, this, the greatest shrine
of the Buddhist world, rising from a little hilltop just behind the
main part of the city of Rangoon, lifted its gilded and glistening
form hundreds of feet skyward. This is the first object of special
importance that is looked for by every traveler going up the Rangoon
River. It is seen before any public building comes into view. But
presently the smoke from the great chimneys of the large rice mills of
Rangoon appeared, and then the city was outlined along a river frontage
of two or three miles. The city has no special attractions, as viewed
from the harbor; but the whole river presents an animated scene, always
interesting even to any one familiar with it, but full of startling
surprises to the newcomer to the East. With the single exception of
Port Said, our missionary party had seen nothing of Oriental life. The
panoramic view of that river and shore life seen on that last day of
1890 will remain a lifetime in the minds of our party. Steamers of many
nations and sailing-vessels under a score of flags, native crafts of
every description, steam launches by the dozen, and half a thousand
small native boats of a Chinese pattern, called “sampans,” moved
swiftly about the river, while two or three thousand people crowded
the landing and the river front. It is possible that half a hundred
nationalities were represented in that throng, but to us strangers
there were only two distinctions to be made out clearly: a few men and
women with fair skins, and the remainder of the multitude men of darker
hue. “Europeans and natives” is the general distinction used in all
India.
Some incidents at such moments in our lives, as our landing in this
strange country, make profound impressions far above their actual
importance. It was just six o’clock in the evening as we made fast
to the wharf. Suddenly, as I faced the new world life of labor just
before me, and began to contrast it with that of the past, I remembered
that just eleven years before, on that day and at that hour, allowing
for difference of latitude, I stepped off the cars in a college
town, and parted with my old life as a farmer boy for the new life
of a college student. A great change that proved to be, and this was
destined to prove even more in contrast with life hitherto. The curious
circumstance was that the two transitions corresponded by the year and
hour.
I awoke suddenly to the fact of great loneliness. There were multitudes
of people, but in the whole company not a familiar face. There were
some whose names we had heard, and they were ready to give us a cordial
welcome as fellow-workers, but we did not know them from all the others
in the throng in whose thoughts we had no place. For myself, I have
never had a more lonely moment, even when unattended in the Burma
jungles or lost on the mountains at night.
Another incident, of a painful kind, occurred. As I stood beside the
ship’s doctor, who had been coming and going to India for thirty years,
he volunteered information of the people who were boarding the ship to
greet expected friends. One young lady passenger was greeted by her
sister, whose husband stood by her side. She was a fair English lady;
he was a tall, well-proportioned man of good features, but he was
very dark. The doctor said: “That young lady is destined to a great
disappointment. Her sister is married to a Eurasian, and she, as an
English girl, will have no social recognition among English people
here because she has that Eurasian relationship.” To my inquiries
of interest, he said many things about these people, in whose veins
flow the blood of European and Asiatic, concluding with the following
slander on these people, “They inherit the vices of both Europeans
and Asiatics and the virtues of neither.” I refer to this expression
here to show how such unjust expressions fall from careless tongues;
for I have heard it scores of times, breathing out unkind, even cruel
injustice. It is a slander that is not often rebuked with the energy
its injustice calls for. As I will discuss this people in another
chapter, I only say here that for ten years I have been connected with
them, and while they have their weaknesses, this charge against them is
entirely groundless.
We were presently greeted by the small band of Methodist missionaries
and some of their friends, and taken immediately to our Girls’ School
in the heart of the town. Here we rested in easy-chairs of an uncouth
pattern, but which we have hundreds of times since had occasion to
prove capable of affording great comfort. While resting and making
the acquaintance of Miss Scott, our hostess, an agent of the Woman’s
Foreign Missionary Society, I was impressed with several features of
our new surroundings. Though it was New-Year’s Eve, the whole house was
wide open, and three sides of the sitting-room had open venetian blinds
instead of walls, to let in the air.
Then we were quickly conscious of the noise, mostly of human voices,
speaking or shouting strange speech in every direction, which the
wooden open-plank house caught up much as a violin does its sound, and
multiplied without transferring them into music. We came, by later
painful experiences, to know that one of the enemies of nerves and the
working force of the missionary in Rangoon is the ceaseless noise from
human throats that seems inseparable from this Oriental city. I have
been in some other noisy cities, but, as Bishop Thoburn once remarked,
our location in Rangoon was “the noisiest place in the world.” Before
these thoughts had taken full possession of our minds, we were greeted
by another surprise. As we leaned back in the easy-chairs and our eyes
sought the high ceiling of the room, there we saw small lizards moving
about, sometimes indeed stationary, but more often running or making
quick leaps as they caught sluggish beetles or unsuspecting flies from
the ceiling. We counted nine of them in plain view, seemingly enjoying
themselves, unmindful of the presence of the residents of the building
or the nerves or tastes of the new arrivals.
A watch-night service was held that night intended for sailors and
soldiers especially, to which I went, while my wife remained and rested
at the school with our children. At the service I saw for the first
time what is so common in all like gatherings in Eastern cities, the
strange mingling of all people who speak the English language. Being
a seaport, the sailors from every European land were present, and, so
far as they can be secured, attend this wholesome service, while the
soldiers from the garrison come in crowds, and others interested in
these meetings are there also. Every shade of Eurasians was present.
Some of the people whom I saw that night for the first time became
my friends and co-laborers in the Church and mission for the entire
time of which I write. Late that night, or in the earliest hour of the
new year, I fell asleep with my latest conscious thought, “We are in
Burma.”