taste of the community are concentrated. They are built of brick and plastered with white cement, which gleams like marble through the heavy, dark foliage of the trees in the temple-grounds. Wood-carvings and gold-leaf and mosaics of colored glasses or isinglass wrought into many devices decorate the front entrance and doorway. Standing apart, they have a domain of their own. Their broad grounds are enclosed by a brick fence covered with white cement. In proximity to the temple are the numerous little houses of the priests, whom we can see, at all hours and in all places, marching about in dress of bright yellow and with bald, shaven heads.
The shady seclusion of these grounds, with the images of Buddha sitting in darkness within the temple, and it being also the abode of the priesthood, make it a place of great sanctity and veneration to these superstitious people.
The same uniformity presents itself in every hamlet and town in our route. Between these places miles and miles of solitary silence stretch away, until we could readily imagine that all of human kind had forsaken the earth, and that we, by some strange destiny, were left in this big "basket of bulrushes" to go on and on interminably. What wonder, then, that the sight of a town or a passing boat are pleasant interruptions on this monotonous highway?
Reaching Nakawn Soowun (i. e. "City of
