[Illustration: “THE BUDDHIST MONASTERIES ARE FINE, SUBSTANTIAL ERECTIONS, MASSIVE, SPACIOUS AND VERY RICH IN DECORATION.”] Although there are in Burma so many pagodas, monasteries and other religious buildings, which are fine, substantial erections, massive, spacious and very rich in decoration, the dwellings of the people are, as a rule, very poor in accommodation, and are of bamboo, the flimsiest of material, and specially liable to destruction by fire. The posts of the house are of teak, the floor is of bamboos, and raised from two to six feet from the ground, the walls are of bamboo matting not much thicker than stout brown paper, and the roof is of bamboo thatch. These houses, though so slightly made, are warm enough for the climate. The floor especially seems very frail to a stranger, made of half bamboos, round side upwards, and lashed together with strips of cane. It gives and sways under your feet as you walk over it in an alarming manner, but the bamboos, though they bend, do not easily break. The Burmans like that kind of a house. It is cool and airy. The floor shows a space between each bamboo, and those spaces are particularly convenient for an easy-going people. All kinds of miscellaneous things not required, including scraps and remnants of food, can be dropped through the floor, so that it requires no sweeping. The mighty host of ownerless, homeless, starving dogs that roam over the town can be safely trusted to find anything there is to eat, and they are not of dainty appetite. All cooking has to be done outside the house, either in a separate building, or more commonly in a little square hole dug in the ground for the purpose, to prevent, if possible, sparks being blown about by the high winds that prevail at certain seasons of the year. Owing to the extremely inflammable nature of the buildings in Burma, fires are of frequent occurrence, and are exceedingly destructive. In addition to the ordinary risk from cooking fires and paraffin oil lamps, the people are exceedingly careless in handling fire, and they are all smokers. They smoke a kind of cigar made of chopped tobacco mixed with some light woody substance, and enclosed in the outer leaf of the maize cob, or some other leaf used for the same purpose, and these cigars drop sparks in all directions. The end of the hot, dry season, in April and May, when everything is like tinder, and when the high winds prevail, is the most destructive time for fires, and every year at that time they are of daily occurrence in Mandalay, and sometimes scores and sometimes hundreds of bamboo houses are swept away. During the four years I have lived in Mandalay I have known many large portions of the town destroyed time after time.