Like the ancients, almost every Burman “carries with him a _parawaik_,[138] in which he keeps his accounts, copies songs till he can repeat them from memory, and takes memorandums of anything curious. It is on these _parawaiks_ that the zares or writers, in all courts and public offices, take down the proceedings and orders of the superior officers, from thence copying such parts as are necessary into books of a more durable and elegant nature. The _parawaik_ is made of one sheet of thick and strong paper blackened over. A good one may be about eight feet long and eighteen inches wide. It is folded up somewhat like a fan, each fold or page being about six inches, and in length the whole breadth of the sheets. Thence, wherever the book is opened, whichever side is uppermost, no part of it can be rubbed but the two outer pages, and it only occupies a table one foot in width by eighteen inches long. The Burmas write on the _parawaik_ with a pencil of steatites.... When that which has been written on a _parawaik_ becomes no longer useful, the pages are rubbed over with charcoal and the leaves of a species of dolichos; they are then clean as if new, and equally fit for the pencil.”[139] It will not be amiss to pursue the usual plan that I have proposed to myself, and in every practicable case to illustrate the literature of a nation by extracts from some one of its approved works. Fortunately, the missionary Sangermano has supplied me with the means of doing so, which would otherwise have failed. I cannot do better, therefore, than quote from that writer his account and extracts from one of their volumes. It will, I suppose, furnish as fair a specimen of their literature as any which can be offered. “Among these books,” says Sangermano, “the one called Aporazabon deserves to be placed the first; it is a species of romance, in which the principal character is Aporazà, an old minister, to whom the emperor, and several mandarins, put a number of questions on the science of government. To give my readers some idea of this work, I will here translate some extracts.[140]