strangely visible to the audience; bon mots which produce rounds of laughter and applause from the amphitheatre of heads; love-making and sentimental talking; in short an interminable trash of comedy, tragedy, pantomime, singing, dancing, capering, and music, which lasts for four or five consecutive nights, and to which there appears no limit but the purse of the host, and the not easily satiated enjoyment of the audience. The whole exhibition is, however, exceedingly characteristic of the people, love, war, and boat-songs are amongst them; the sentiments and imagery of their songs are of course thoroughly Talain and Burmese, and a European may often be amused by what to him must appear the strange notions of beauty, feeling and heroism which they convey.

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Such are the general habits of the bulk of the population of the Tenasserim provinces; a people inferior to the Hindus in agricultural skill and industry, but superior in general character, being more independent of spirit, less degraded by their religion and its superstitions, free from caste, from slavery to a load of trivial observances, and owing to the more favourable condition of woman and her rights, having a better social system; also, more advanced in the general diffusion of elementary education. Fond of amusement and idleness, and inhabiting a country, which, from its soil, climate, and streams, affords an abundance of food with the exaction of no great amount of labour, the people cannot be held as remarkable for their industry. Though fond of money they are not fond of toil, and as the price of labour is high from the scantiness of the population, a very little exertion suffices to enable a man to indulge in a protracted enjoyment of idleness; continuous exertion is therefore a rare quality amongst them.

Although not subject to the action of debasing rites and ceremonies such as those of the Hindus, a puerile superstition has a very strong-hold upon the minds of the Talains. The Nats receive much attention; they appear to parcel out the country into distinct jurisdictions and endowed with every variety of character, disposition, and occupation; they are the Dianas of the chase, and must be courted by the elephantcatcher and the game-killer; very influential with tigers, upon whose heads they ride, they can, when propitiated, shut the jaws of their steeds and render them of lamb-like innocence. Nats too have agricultural propensities, are not averse to meddling with horticultural pursuits, and can blight or favor a fruit season at pleasure; Nats are the only members of the faculty who can cope with cholera and small-pox, and who

without a diploma, thoroughly command the various ills which men are heirs to. Again, Nats are as domestic as cats, and those which have a turn for house-keeping exact a good deal of in-door consideration: they appear almost as touchy and treacherous as their feline rivals, and it is only with a salvo to the influence of the Nat that a man is master in his own house. There are Nats of the water as well as of the land, and go where one will, there the Nat is on the mind of the Talain. Still, Nats are not very ill-natured nor very greedy; a cocoa-nut, rags of red cloth, flowers, paper streamers, and the like, are the offerings which are esteemed propitiatory and gratifying, and being easily obtained, there is no very good reason why every Nat in the country should not retain its good humour. The Nats play a still more prominent part amongst a race, the helots of Burmah and Pegu, namely, the Karens.

This very curious and interesting people now occupy the various mountainous and difficult tracts of country throughout Burmah, Pegu, the Tenasserim coast, and parts of the Shan and Siamese countries. The Karens are a timid and oppressed people, speaking a language wholly different from both the Burmese and Talain, and are regarded by the nations amongst whom they are scattered as an inferior race. Long subjection has led them to form the same estimate of themselves, and to imagine that nature has doomed them to a subordinate condition. Their only resource from tyranny and oppression is the refuge of their loved mountains and forests, and to these they cling with a warm affection for the wild life, which, in the absence of a more manly spirit amongst them as a people, is the only one that can secure to them comparative liberty and the absence of oppression.

The Karens are Deists, and amongst them are traditions of the creation of man, his fall, the deluge, the subsequent peopling of the earth, and of the growth of idolatry amongst its inhabitants which appear to have a Mosaic origin. They are not idolators, but have fallen away from the purity of the worship of one only God, and have sunk into a superstitious dread of Nats, and a system of endeavouring to secure their favor which borders closely on Nat worship. It would almost seem as if they considered that the Nats had full liberty from an incensed Deity to plague earth and its inhabitants. Nat houses, looking like children's play-things from the diminutive size, are constantly met with in the forests, and at the foot of some gigantic tree would be passed almost unheeded, but for the request that the traveller will not disturb the dwelling and the offerings of the Nat.

Their system of cultivation is suited to the nature of the country they occupy, and is therefore different from that of the Burmese and Talain who occupy the rich, well-watered alluvial plains. The Karen, having cut down a tract of jungle, fires it when the end of the dry weather facilitates the operation. He then plants his rice after the first fall of rain has moistened the earth, and enabled him without difficulty to make the small holes in which he plants his seed. He seldom takes more than two or three crops from the field he has cleared, but proceeds to take more virgin soil from the jungle and forest. When, in the course of this system, the fields are getting somewhat remote from a village, and the distance is felt to be inconvenient, the village is deserted and another built near to the new patches of cultivation; as the houses are entirely constructed of bamboo. and posts cut in the jungle, material is always at hand, and a few days' labour is all that is requisite for the completion of a new village. In the course of years a deserted clearance is covered with jungle, and in five or six years the process of cutting and burning may again pass over it. Thus a village of Karens wanders within certain limits, and occasionally after a shorter or longer period may go over its old clearances a second time.

The domestic habits of this race are more filthy than those of the Talains; they seem to have an aversion to frequent ablutions, and the clear waters of their mountain streams are much neglected; several absurd legends are assigned as the cause of this hydrophobic humour of the Karens, for them a most unfortunate prejudice. There is a remarkable absence of selfishness amongst them; they may be almost said to have things in common; whatever they have they will always willingly share with their village brethren. They are, as a race, handsomer, according to European notions, than the Talains or Burmans. Karens are fond of spirituous liquors, and on festive occasions the women are kept employed distilling the rice spirit upon which their husbands are getting drunk. Having originally no written characters in which to express their language, their laws and customs were orally transmitted from father to son. Bigamy was deemed dishonorable; adultery was punished with death; and the elders were in all matters of moment the judges and the leaders of the people. They have a singular custom of taking the bones and ashes of their dead to some place in the jungles known only to themselves; for this no sufficient reason is assigned by them, and the Talains and Burmese attribute the custom to the fact that a portion of the wealth of the deceased

is placed along with his bones and ashes; fear that these should be disturbed on account of the valuables deposited with them, induces secrecy as to what may be termed the sepulchral spots. The Talains assert that the revenge of a Karen is sure to follow the disturber of the remains of his fathers; be this as it may, the departure of a soul to the land of spirits is a festive occasion, and the friends and relatives meet to sing wild dirges, and drink till they can sing no longer.

Karens are lazy and averse to exertion, but good-tempered, very credulous, and more truthful than their more intelligent but less scrupulous neighbours. The arts are at low ebb among them, though some of their manufactures, particularly the beadornamented apparel of the women, are curious; the dress of the men is extremely simple, consisting usually of two blankets or pieces of the coarse cloth made by the women, sown together, so as to form a kind of armless coat or frock, with a part in the centre unsown, through which the head passes, and the same at the sides, for the arms. Karens are fond of singing and their airs are wild and pretty; the language being by no means unfavourable to the musical propensity of the people, and in itself exacting the greatest nicety and delicacy of ear and of pronunciation from the great play and variety of the vowel sounds which are distinguished in both dialects of their language.

Cholera, fever, and small pox are so much dreaded that Karens desert their villages and remove to other situations as soon as they are invaded by these scourges. The infected, unless they can move themselves, are left to their fate. Change of air and site seems the chief medical resource of the Karens; for their secondary ones, namely, offerings to the Nats of whatever they deem calculated to tickle fairy palates, do not appear to produce many very remarkable cures, though frequently resorted to.

Karens are, in their own way, bold hunters, and not above eating their own game even when a rhinoceros. They are however not bolder than the Talains, some of whom gain a livelihood by catching elephants, and prosecute this occupation in a most perilous manner; two men, mounted on a trained elephant and carrying a spear and a lasso made of leather rope, manage to get amongst a herd of wild elephants and then single out one to whom they give chase. The lasso is cast so as to catch one of the hind legs of the wild elephant; the other end of the lasso is fastened to the girdle of the trained animal, and the duty of the second man is to sit on the back of the elephant and to hold the coil and cast the lasso at the right moment;

if the wild elephant turns, he is kept off by the spear point and the tame elephant; he usually however makes off as fast as he can, accompanied by the trained animal, who must have good paces; when the wild one is tired, or as soon as he affords his hunters a favorable opportunity, his further flight is arrested by a turn being taken round a stout tree, to which the lasso is ultimately made fast. Starvation for a time, and then the gift of food soon renders the wild animal manageable. Such a method of elephant hunting is, for many reasons, very perilous; but strange to say the men employed in this hazardous occupation have a greater dread of the tiger than of the elephant, being more frequently a prey to the former than to the latter; for nights must be passed in the jungle to watch for the herds of wild elephants, and for fear of scaring these, the usual precautions against the tiger cannot be taken, so that the elephant-catcher runs greater risk from the stealthy and murderous spring of the tiger than from the infuriate violence of his gigantic game, the elephant. No bolder, yet more superstitious Nat worshippers than this class of hunters!

In Amherst province a portion of the people are Toungthoos; they are the best cultivators in the province, being the only people who understand the use of the plough. Distinct from the Talains, Burmese, and Karens by language, dress, and habits, their original country is not well ascertained; the name implies a hill man, and the use of the plough with a metal blade argues a higher country than the plains of Pegu, and a soil which required a more laborious culture than has been forced upon the people of the land of their adoption. Their pipes, their dresses, and other minor peculiarities indicate a more ingenious people; but their language and its literature remain unmastered by Europeans, and therefore little or nothing is known of the race except that they are esteemed good cultivators.

In the province of Mergui there is a considerable mixture of Siamese blood amongst the Talains and Burmese, but as the Siamese have intermarried with, and conformed to the laws and customs of, the people amongst whom they emigrated, no particular description is necessary.

Such may be said to have been the different races whom we found inhabiting the provinces ceded to the East India Company by the treaty of Yandaboo. Moguls, Jews, Armenians, Chinese, natives. of the Madras and Bengal provinces, followed in the wake of our troops; and as soon as possession of the country was fairly taken, settled down, chiefly at Moulmein, in considerable numbers; but, like the Europeans, being