In Dariel and a broom-stick! dignation may flash as fast in the meadows as in the mountains. "You idiot! You talk like an utter cad," I cried; and he being quick of temper too, stood his gun against a tree, and looked at me. I set my gun by the side of his. "Let us have it out," was all I said. But a gleam of reason came across him. He might have polished me off perhaps, though he would not have found it very easy, for I was the heavier of the two, and in tidy rural condition. "What rot this is!" he said, lowering his hands. "If you like to have a good smack at me, you can. But I won't hit a fellow with Grace's eyes." I knew that he had meant business, and that there was no white feather in his nature. He begged my pardon, and we shook hands; and I felt just a little ashamed of myself, although when I think of what he said, I see no misbehaviour on my part. Without another word, we dropped the question, and went on to look after the woodcocks. We crossed the long "pray," with the keeper and three spaniels com ing after us, and whether it was that Jackson's hand shook after menacing "the eyes of Grace," or that mine was extra steady through that firm assertion of Dariel, it came to pass that I knocked over both of the birds that we put up, when they were sailing away from Jackson's gun. The other longbill saved his bacon, by keeping it out of human eyes. These lucky shots, and the pleasant walk, and very fine behaviour of the dogs - who were children of the animals I had loved and chastened, in the better days both for them and me-put me into so noble a frame of mind, that after an excellent dinner and a glass or two of Port wine with the violet bouquet in it, I up and told Stoneman my own love-story; for I knew that the whole of it must come out now. He, being pretty much in the same condition, though without anything like my excuse for it, listened as if he had never heard anything half so surprising and engrossing and inspiriting. In fact, he seemed to take the whole of it as applicable to his own case, though it was beyond my power to perceive even the faintest analogy. His was an ordinary love-affair with nothing remarkable about it, unless it were that money, which is the usual obstacle by its absence, was the obstacle here by its presence. But in my case money was the last thing thought of. Sûr Imar had never mentioned it; and as for me, I only hoped that Dariel might never own a shilling, because then she would appreciate my few halfcrowns. And I still possessed her ruby cross, and meant to keep it, until it should be mine by legal right. Ah, who can spy any chance of that through all the gloom impending? VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXVIII. 2 P HOW THE FAMINE CAME TO BURMA. ALTHOUGH here in Burma we cannot do things on the extensive scale they do in India, although we do not estimate the distressed area by tens of thousands of square miles and our suffering population by millions, nevertheless the famine of 1896-97 is a very real thing to us. Its effects are entirely confined to the upper province, the country that was annexed in 1885, when Mandalay was taken and King Thibaw deposed. In Lower Burma there is no scarcity at all, but, on the contrary, a bumper crop of rice, the largest on record. In the seaward provinces of Arracan and Tenasserim, and in the delta of Irrawaddy, which together form the lower province, the rains never fail. Out of the endless ocean to the south-west the wind comes up punctually in May, and from then until September rain is almost incessant there. The rivers, too, rise and flood their banks, and the country is turned into one vast swamp. In this rich wet land the rice is grown, and when the rains have ceased and the rivers gone down it is reaped. There are of course good seasons and bad seasons, but anything approaching to a scarcity is unknown. There is always a surplus, this year it amounts to over one and threequarters of a million tons of rice. But about 150 miles north of Rangoon, near the line dividing the two provinces, all this is altered. The rain suddenly ceases. As you come up by train or by river, the change is extraordinary. In a few miles you leave the dense soaking mists and flat alluvial land of the lower country, and come out into dry undulating uplands, where the sun shines for ever. The whole world is changed around you. The rice, which cannot exist except in water, has given way to sessamum, and cotton, and jowar crops, which abhor damp. The grass, which grows 15 feet high in the uncultivated land below, is changed into a thin meagre herbage which barely covers the ground. The jungle has deteriorated into thorn-bushes and cutch-trees. And this extends with but little alteration for 400 miles, until, north of Shwebo, you come to the hill country again, where rain is ample. On both sides, this tract is bounded by great mountain ranges; on the east by the Shan plateau, and on the west by the Chin hills, and through it north and south flows the Irrawaddy river. It is this stretch of country that is really the home of the Burman. Within it lie all the old Burman capitals-Pagan and Sagain, Ava and Amarapura and Shwebo, and many another. Lower Burma has been but recently Burmanised. The population is really Talaing, and in 1825, when the first Burmese war occurred, we found the Burmese in Pegu as conquerors. Now it would be hard to find in Lower Burma, except in remote places, any one calling himself Talaing. There has been a large emigration from the upper country to the delta, and the superior race has absorbed the inferior. This emigration has been caused in part, no doubt, by the increasing scarcity of rain in the upper province. Whereas in Lower Burma the annual rainfall averages from 100 to 200 inches, in the centre of It Upper Burma, the tract that I am writing of, it is only from 18 to 30 inches, and even this scanty fall is not well distributed. comes not in days of mild soaking rain, but in sudden heavy showers, that last for an hour or two, fill all the ravines with torrents and drain away in a few days, leaving the country as arid as before. There is, I think, considerable evidence that this failure of the rain is a matter of this century, even of the latter part of the century, and that in former years Upper Burma was much more fruitful than it is now. In what is now the very driest part of the dry tract there are the remains of the old city of Pagan. Six hundred years ago this was the capital of a little kingdom, and to judge by the remains of innumerable pagodas in the neighbourhood, it must have been of some considerable size. Now, cities are not built in deserts. Above all necessities for a large city are a copious and well-distributed water-supply, and a fertile surrounding country. Large cities require water for domestic consumption, and for gardens and orchards, and numerous purposes. Moreover it must not be necessary to go far for it. Now, in the Pagan of to-day the only water is the Irrawaddy river, which flows near, and the country around is barren and unfertile. Supplies for a large number of people could not be obtained on the spot, but would have to be brought from a very considerable distance. Without a doubt, the country round Pagan must in those days have been fertile and well watered by a sufficient rainfall. But there are evidences in much later days that the rainfall has decreased. Here and there all over this tract, wherever there is a piece of clay land stiff enough to retain water, you will find it levelled and embanked into rice-fields. In late years they have never been worked; but if you ask the villagers about them they will say: "Yes-these are good fields when there is rain; but only twice or thrice in our lifetime have we been able to reap them. In our fathers' days crops would be obtained every second year or so, and our grandfathers worked them every year." They are fields beyond any possibility of irrigation. So clearly this was rain. The villagers will also tell you that, except the great famine of 1856-57, it was not until King Thibaw's time that rain began to fail. In his father King Mindoon's reign there was no scarcity. "That was because he was a religious man," they say. "He convened the great Synod, and he was very just and honourable, a protector of wisdom. But King Thibaw was weak. The kingdom fell into bad hands. Religion was forgotten, and in consequence the country suffered." That is the explanation. Curiously enough, the first few years of the British conquest were good years. But the country was so distressed, so disturbed, that fields were not ploughed, seed was not sown. Fields were not cultivated from fear of us, from fear of dacoits, from ignorance of what was about to happen, and so the cultivators had but little in hand wherewith to combat the bad times which began in 1890. The rainfall in the early part of that year was scanty in many places, and though the later rains were fairly good, yet there was a deficiency. In 1891 the crops were still shorter, and in 1892 there was a scarcity-hardly amounting to a famine, but still a severe scarcity-in Yamethin, in Meiktila, and in Myingyan, the three worst districts. After that, for a year or two matters improved slightly. In 1893 better crops were reaped; in 1894 there was again a slight pinch in places. In 1895, in the early tracts where sessamum was grown, good crops were reaped, but the failure of the late rains caused the jowar and late sessamum to be scanty. Remission of revenue had to be granted in many. places, and the people were not in good heart to face another bad year. Then came 1896. The early rain failed almost completely. Whereas we usually expect showers in the end of March and in April, to soften the earth for ploughing and preparing for the early crops, no rain fell until the end of May. The hot weather was thus exceptionally long and severe, and the heat was intense. The ground was utterly dried up, wells shrank lower than they had ever done, and it was very hard to find pasture for cattle. At the end of May and early in June we had a great deal of rain—more than enough. And about the middle of that month it ceased, and from then until the middle of October, the whole of the southwest monsoon time, there was no rain of any consequence. The country became baked up, as if it were again the hot weather. The young crops that had been sown and had sprouted fairly, withered up. The lower leaves of the palms turned yellow, the grass died. Even the cotton, which is supposed to revel in dryness, withered and hung its head. On October 14 and 15 we had two days' heavy rain, and that is the last that we have had. The three days' rain which is usually expected at the end of November, and which is of inestimable value to fill the ears of the jowar, the sessamum, and the rice, never came. In addition to this want of rain there was another misfortune. Between Mandalay in the north and Minbu on the south there is a great area of land, principally on the west of the river, that is inundated by the Irrawaddy in its floods, and wherein rice is grown, fed by the flood-water. But this year the Irrawaddy never properly rose. It was not until August that there was any good rise, and when this fell there was no other. Much land was never planted at all, and much that was planted withered off as the river fell. So in this year there has been a complication of misfortunes. Of none of the staple crops of cotton, jowar, sessamum, or beans has more than a third been gathered. In many places the seed has hardly been returned to the cultivators. And there was a promise of rain that made the disappointment all the more bitter. The rain of October 14 and 15 had done great good. The jowar and sessamum and beans had profited by it. The jowar especially was in good heart, tall and strong, with the promise of a fair crop, enough at least to keep the people from great stringency. What little rice had been planted was looking well, the beans were covering the ground with green tendrils, and the late sessamum was lusty and strong. It wanted but two days' or even one day's good rain to give the growing crops the necessary refreshment, to start the sap into the ears to fill them. And in November it promised to come. For two or three days there had been heavy banks of cloud in the south, gathering every evening, shooting lightning. They came nearer and nearer, until at last one morning we woke up to hear a little dropping on the roofrain at last! As the sun rose the rain ceased, and the clouds lifted, but they did not clear off. On the hill in front the clouds hung in low long mists of vapour well into the forenoon, and the distance was full of mist. The people were delighted. "We are not brother to the rain, and cannot be sure," they said; "but when there are clouds upon that hill in the morning, it is an almost certain sign of rain within twenty-four hours." I was at a village that morninga village whose whole future depended on the crops that were then bursting into ear round about -and as I talked to the people about the season they were full of hope. "We shall be hard up," they said, "and it will be difficult for us to pay taxes, but as to food there will be enough. It will rain to-night, and the ears will fill, and we shall gather enough, eked out with jungle roots and fruits, to take us on till the early crops come." They spoke cheerfully with that delightful courage and hopefulness of which surely no people have so much as they, and as I rode back to my camp, it seemed to me that the fear of the worst was over. There would be a scarcity, but no more. Yet even as I rode back, the sun was sucking up the mists. The pagoda on the hilltop shadowed faintly through the thinning vapours, and far away the sky was clear and blue. By the afternoon the mist was gone, and when the sun set, in all the great sweep of sky there was no sign of cloud. The people were in despair. "If it had not promised us," they said, "it would have been less 66 hard to bear. But we thought it was a certainty, and it has failed." Thakin," said a headman, "for the last year when we have been asked about our crops we have said 'We hope.' Now we shall never say that again. We shall say 'We fear."" The districts in which the failure of crops has been most severe are Yamethin, Meiktila, and Myingyan, covering about 10,000 square miles, with a population, according to the census of 1891, of 370,000. But the neighbouring districts have also suffered more or less. Parts of Magwe, of Minbu, of Pakkoku, and of Sagain, are nearly as badly off, and the districts of Shwebo, Mandalay, and the Lower Chindwin have had great losses. No doubt there will be considerable distress in these districts, and considerable remissions of revenue will have to be made, but the "famine" will most probably be confined to the three districts first named, and the parts of other districts in immediate contact with them. The position now may be simply summarised as follows: Of cotton almost onethird of an average crop was reaped; of rice, except in wellirrigated places, even less. The early and late crops of sessamum failed in most places, and of what is the main food-crop, jowar, perhaps one-third was reaped. It will be understood that villages vary in the fertility of soil and other particulars. Some villages have done better than this, some have done worse. Of the palms, which are the mainstay of many villages, by the palm-juice which they yield, an average of a third of a crop may be obtained. This is drawn in February and March. Therefore it may be said that, roughly speaking, their fields |