bamboos, and will be off scouting for a month without giving his enemy a sign of his presence till he closes with him. He shows all the skill of the American Indian in tracking and concealing his own trail.

Among his clansmen and with his chief he is frank and cheerful. With strangers he is timid, suspicious, and retiring. When he descended from the hills to the plains, he, to use his own words, "lived between the legs of other men." One of their old sayings is, "If any one asks you if you have seen his buffalo, don't inquire the shape of his horns; just say, 'I haven't seen him,' for that ends the matter at once." This reticence often makes the Karen appear stupid, awkward, and obstinate, which he really is not. He will take refuge in “I don't know” and a blank stare simply to avoid further questioning.

A Burman is keen to show off his knowledge— sometimes more than his knowledge; a Karen will rather conceal what he knows, frequently to his own hurt. They have a little story which illustrates this. Once upon a time there was a King of Ava wedded to a Karen maiden. The young queen's relatives accompanied her to the capital. The king's followers were raised to places of

honour, but the queen's relatives were left out in the cold. The queen was annoyed at this, and one night lectured her royal spouse on this neglect of her people. The king said, "Your relatives are not fit for posts of honour." The queen, however, pleaded hard for them, and at last the king consented to give them a trial. Accordingly, a Karen was appointed joint-gardener with a Burman. A few days afterwards the king, while walking in the royal gardens, sent for the Karen and, in the presence of his courtiers, asked him about the condition of the fruit. The Karen bluntly answered, "They are no bigger than my fingers and toes."

The king then called the Burman and asked the same question. The Burman replied, "The fruit, alas! is not yet fit for your Majesty's table." The queen was then called, and the king said to her, "Just imagine your wishing me to appoint your friends to offices of state. Why, they do not know even how to speak properly."

Strange to say, notwithstanding the Karen's suspicious nature, his hospitality is unbounded. He will entertain every stranger that comes, without asking a question. He feels himself disgraced if he does not receive all comers, and give them

the very best cheer he has. The wildest Karen will receive a guest with a grace and dignity and entertain him with a lavish hospitality that would become a duke. Hundreds of their old legends inculcate the duty of receiving strangers without regard to pecuniary circumstances either of host or guest. One of the missionaries once wished to pay a visit to an old Karen chief whom he had known for many years. As he was about to start, a score of his schoolboys begged hard to be allowed to accompany him and see the hoary chieftain. It was a serious matter for the missionary to take with him a set of hungry schoolboys, to eat the village out of house and home; so they took provisions with them. When the boats reached the village, the old chief eyed suspiciously the hampers of rice and vegetables, and was very indignant when he was told they were the provisions of the party. In vain the missionary pleaded that he knew how bad the last year's paddy crop had been, and how ill the villagers could afford to feed his party. The old man was inexorable; he had been disgraced before his clan and in his own eyes. So the stores of rice and vegetables were given up and left under a guard till the party were about to leave, when a double quantity of fresh food was forced on them as

L

punishment for the offence which had been unwittingly committed.

The Karen accepts hospitality as freely and in the same spirit as he gives it. He regards it as his inviolable right to entertain all strangers and to be entertained by them in turn; and he is indignant enough with the Burman whom he has often feasted when, as occasionally happens, a like generous treatment is refused to him. Sometimes this unreasoning hospitality brings him into trouble. I have known of a Karen feeding a lot of Burmans of whom he knew nothing, and who had come on a cattle-lifting expedition. The Burmans were seized, and gave up their unlucky host's name. The Karen was sent to jail with the Burmans, although entirely innocent of any knowledge of the crime committed by his guests. He had never questioned them; they came to his house, and he took them in. When the poor fellow came out. of jail, he was not one whit deterred from his customary hospitality. "Why," said he, "should I do wrong and give up my ancestral custom because the Government did me wrong?"

A Burman will quarrel and fly into a passion, and when he has cooled off he will be as good a friend as ever again. The Karen will not show his

passion, but will hold fire for, perhaps, years. A cursory acquaintance leads one to fancy that the Karens are far more peaceable than the Burmans. It is not so, however. Certainly, they do not quarrel so openly or so often, but their hatreds are far more serious and irreconcilable, although you see less of them. In trying to reconcile two Karens who have been enemies perhaps for years, it is often very difficult to get them even to state their grounds of complaint. In many cases a mere statement of the facts and a brief explanation are sufficient to put an end to the quarrel. The parties are found to be utterly ignorant of each other's grievance each had sulkily brooded over his fancied wrongs and merely avoided the other.

A Burman, when angry with you, shows at once by his noisy clamouring what the matter is. He cools down very soon after he has had his say. A Karen who is angry with you severely lets you alone, and you have serious difficulty often in finding out what is wrong. If he is aggrieved by any act of a Government officer, he says nothing openly, but quietly passes on the word that the officer in question is "no friend to Karens." The wrong done, or believed to be done, is never forgotten, and the officer concerned will never be able to get