Attractive as this work was in one’s own language, and amongst one’s own people, I felt from the first that the mission to the Burmans, though an incomparably more difficult, less inviting, and less immediately successful work, was my own most pressing duty, and the work for which I had specially come. On my arrival in Rangoon I had engaged the services of a young Burman, and brought him up to Mandalay that he might teach me Burmese, and with him I commenced the study of the language at once. But if any one imagines that a native munshee teaches as an English teacher teaches, he is greatly mistaken. For want of the ability to impart the knowledge he has, the teaching does not flow from him as from a fountain; it has to be laboriously pumped out of him, and it requires some ingenuity to find how to work that pump, and if you fail to pump, or do not pump judiciously, you get nothing. In learning any Oriental language you have, in fact, to teach yourself, using the so-called teacher in much the same way as you would use the dictionary, or any other passive repository of the necessary knowledge. In studying Burmese, I found it necessary not only to spend as many hours as I could daily with my munshee and my books, but to go out amongst the people for the sake of learning the spoken language. Every language has some difference between its literary and its colloquial style; and it is quite possible for the foreigner to know a good deal that he reads in the books, and yet to be quite nonplussed with the ordinary talk of the people. Unless the foreigner pays attention to the colloquial, though he may in time find himself able to talk after a bookish fashion, he will be unable to make himself properly understood, and unable also to know what the people say in reply. For this reason I made a practice of going out of an evening, often with one of my children’s picture books in my hand, and sitting down amongst the Burmans at their doors, using the pictures as a means of scraping up a conversation—being myself short of words—with notebook in hand, to take down every new word or idiom I heard. As the Burmans appreciate pictures very much, I found this plan always made them talkative, and thus served my purpose as well as amusing them.