The purchase of the site for the school-chapel, and the erection of the building at Mandalay, furnished an experience sufficiently trying to my patience, and consumed a great deal of valuable time, and I could not but wish I had some native brethren, to share the burden of these tedious details. Time is no object to the Oriental, and in dealing with him you have to be prepared to see much precious time wasted. Having chosen the site that seemed on the whole best, the next thing was to purchase it. It was a square piece of land, about an acre and a half in extent, bounded on two sides by the public streets, and on these two sides there were about twenty-five bamboo houses, each in a little plot of ground, all belonging to different owners, besides six or seven more houses inside the square. In the Burmese times no deeds were used; everything went by word of mouth; indeed there hardly could be said to be any property in land, as everything belonged to the king. It was therefore, after the annexation, a matter of no little delicacy and risk to buy land, as the evidence of ownership, in the absence of deeds, was most precarious. The danger was that the buyer, in the absence of any local knowledge, should buy from some one who could not prove his title, and afterwards should have to purchase it over again from the real owner. A great deal of property changed hands at that time in Mandalay, and this mishap occurred in some cases. In the case of the Mission, although in our three stations we had to purchase from thirty or forty different owners, we managed in every case to make one payment serve. I also found that there were amongst the dwellers on the site of the school-chapel, three different kinds of tenure, and we had to be careful not to purchase what the holder had no power to sell. Some six or seven people were merely squatters, and had put up their bamboo houses there without any right or title to the land. The greater number held the land on what is known in Mandalay as the _Ahmudan_ tenure. They were the soldiers, if we might call them such, or retainers of the king, and held only a temporary or conditional interest in the land, by virtue of military service. One only, out of the whole number, could be regarded as the freehold possessor. We had to pay accordingly to each. It was a tedious business finding out all this. Some of the cases were troublesome to settle. One in particular was in dispute between a certain widow, and a man who is a leper, a relative of hers, for some time both claiming the ownership. At length we reached the end of the negotiations, the last of the bamboo houses was taken down and removed, and we were free to begin with the building.