At the same time we do not wish to silence respectful inquiry. Occasionally a question has been asked at these street services, but we have never experienced anything approaching to abuse or disturbance. One evening, not a Burman but a Ponnâ, an astrologer, one of the fortune-telling fraternity, the descendants of the Brahmins from Manipur, spoke up and said he had an inquiry to make. It was with reference to the putting away of sin through Christ, of which we were speaking, and the inquiry seemed quite respectful, and _bonâ fide_. For his part he could not see how there could be any putting away of sin. If there was, where was it? For example, said he, if a man commits murder, he receives the full penalty of his crime in the body by hanging; and as for the spirit, that passes, by transmigration, at once into some other body, where it receives the appropriate consequences of past deeds, according to the man’s _karma_ (fate), irrespective of any atonement or any intervention of another. What place then was there for the pardon and removal of transgression? This question will show that in Burma we have to do with a people not wanting in acuteness. Our answer was an explanation of the Christian doctrine of a future life. At the end of our first year we were able to report that we had made a beginning in preaching the Gospel in the vernacular. It was a humble beginning, and consisted only of reading to a small congregation, in the little rented schoolroom, before we built our own, a short written address; only a beginning, but a beginning in the right direction. We were also glad to welcome an addition to our little staff of workers, in the Rev. A. H. Bestall, a missionary sent out from England. [Illustration: “THE BURMESE LADIES ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE MYSTERY OF THE CHIGNON, AND WITH THE MANUFACTURE AND USE OF COSMETICS, FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE COMPLEXION, TO SAY NOTHING OF SCENTS AND ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS.”] CHAPTER XVII. _FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS._ It was during our second year in Burma that we opened two new mission stations, one at Kyaukse, and the other at Pakokku. Kyaukse is a town twenty-nine miles south of Mandalay, on the new line of railway, and the centre of the most fertile and best irrigated district in Upper Burma. Our work in Kyaukse has, from the first, been in charge of one of our Singhalese preachers, and its record, up to the present, has been chiefly of preliminary work.