Leaving the mercantile and moneyed classes, and coming to the rank and file, there are in Mandalay some thousands of natives from many different parts of India, speaking many languages, and engaging in a great variety of callings. Europeans often think of India as a country, but it is really a continent, and has as great, if not a far greater, variety of peoples and tribes than Europe presents. There is the Bengalee Baboo, probably a clerk, the Hindustanee doorkeeper or messenger, the Tamil overseer or coolie. Even in our Sepoy army in Mandalay one sees great variety. There is the tall hardy Punjabee, the wild Pathan and the still wilder Beloochee. There is the jolly stout little Goorkha, who stands in such good repute as a fighting man; the somewhat weedy-looking Madrassee, whose name does not rank high for valour; and there is the brave, fierce-looking Sikh, with a national-religious scruple against cutting his hair, who curls the two ends of his beard up round his two ears when it becomes too long to hang down. What tact it must require to mould out of these diverse elements “the finest body of disciplined Asiatic troops in existence,” and yet we are told, and it is true, that the real strength and safety of our Indian Sepoy army lies in the judicious blending and balancing of these diverse elements, a lesson which the great mutiny unmistakably taught us. We depend very much upon Indians for the supplying of our wants in Burma. The butcher, the baker, the washerman, the cook, the railway porter, the writer, the messenger, the soldier, the cabman, the postman, the farrier, the sweetmeat vendor, the sweeper, are in almost all instances natives of India, for the easy-going Burman lets all these employments slip past him. The place is quite a Babel for languages. The names of the stations on the railway indicate the polyglot character of the population. It is of course out of the question to attempt to represent even the half of the tongues commonly spoken, but they select the five which we may presume are in most common use, English, Burmese, Hindustanee, Hindi and Tamil, and the name of the station is painted in all these.