Mandalay swarms with thousands of half-starved, mangy, miserable animals—nobody’s dogs. No matter how they increase and multiply, no Burman is willing to “put them out of their misery”; the firm belief in transmigration prevents this. I have known half a dozen such dreadful creatures quarter themselves uninvited on the Mission premises. One of the half-dozen, a savage brute, living under the school on the Mission premises, one day bit a little Burman boy, and tore his bare arm very badly. This was too much for me. Fearing it might do further mischief, and might even be mad, I waylaid and shot it. The Burmans thought I had done very wrong. Their tender care for animals often appears in touching forms. I have noticed a Burman coolie engaged in mixing mortar, on finding he had brought a number of tadpoles from the neighbouring pond in his bucket of water, take them all out with great care, and carry them back to the pond, though it was 150 yards away and he had to go on purpose. And yet, so strangely inconsistent is human nature, there are perhaps few countries in the world, with any pretensions to civilisation, where human life is held so cheap as in Burma, and where the people have commonly such a propensity to the crime of dacoity or robbery with violence, and often with murder. And yet, again, with strange inconsistency, the coarse and hardened criminal, the Burman dacoit, who has imbrued his hands in his neighbour’s blood more than once, will scruple to harm the vermin that infests his couch.