smokes her "whacking white cheroot" with grace, and exerts rare charm.
In all sight-seeing nothing is such surprise, so Oriental, so dazzling and fascinating as the great Shoëdagong pagoda at Rangoon. It repays one for all the entomological revels of the "B. I." boats to see that colossal, gilded, and jeweled monument surrounded by picturesque worshipers; to watch "the elephants a-pilin' teak"; to see the colossal Sleeping Buddha at Pegu; and to travel past one hundred miles of sacked rice awaiting the overtaxed railway transportation, as one rumbles by rail to Mandalay, where the fantastic gilt and mirror-covered temples, monasteries, and palaces equal one's dreams of "the gorgeous East." Only seeing can convince one what Buddhism can do for a people in contrast with Hinduism or Mohammedanism, and that the pagoda is always in sight in Burma—the swelling, white bodies tapering to needle spires often gilded and tipped with jewels—the sites of deserted cities like Amarapura and Pagan on the lower Irawadi dotted as thickly with temples and pagodas as ever they could have been with houses. Too many chapters would be required for anything like an adequate exploitation of this picturesque country and attractive people; but until the great European mail-steamers touch at Rangoon the pleasure traveler is warned against the slow coasting steamers on which one lives with the heat and the smells and the motion at the very stern, and where huge brown tropical roaches swarm, past any figures of speech to give idea.
