Now, on a declaration of war being ventured, millions are brought into the field, in lieu of thousands, and campaigns that formerly occupied years are (now) a matter of weeks. A Revolution breaks out, and the entire order of Government is reversed in four and twenty hours. Accidents by sea and land are alarming in their frequency, and appalling in their magnitude; murders, committed on the slightest provocation, are known in our furthest possessions almost ere the victims are cold, and are served up in various ways by a sensational press. One by one, too, the various grades of the working classes are quarrelling with their bread and butter, set on by agitators, who eat the grain, leaving their sheep the husks. Endless divorce cases, from the lowest rung to the top of the ladder, fraught with momentous and unlooked-for consequences, disfigure every newspaper. Speculation, which seems to have reached its furthest limits in every direction, is producing commercial panics; and on every side our affairs are trembling in the balance. Garbage is plentiful, and sensational events so unintermittent that it is surprising how editors still find the need of drawing on their inventive faculties! If Tavoy existed at the present day under the old _régime_, few Europeans would survive the ordeal beyond a mail or two. The captain was evidently not enamoured of the place; he took time by the “fetlock,” landed the mails and cargo, and made everything ready to be off early next morning. As soon as sufficient light dawned upon us we backed to that “unriver-like” bend, and were soon out at sea again. Of all the places I ever stopped at, Tavoy remains enveloped in the most impenetrable haze, so far as my recollection of it is concerned. Times without number I have tried to conjure it up in detail; but beyond fragments of buildings, a dense mass of vegetation, and a few natives, I can make nothing of it. I fear, therefore, that the heading of this chapter may be taken as somewhat misleading; it will serve, however, as a halting-place, before the more interesting portion of the trip, with which I shall take leave of the reader. What I do remember of the place is being struck with the fact that none of the officers came on board, whereas the rule is for them to come off in anything that will float as soon as the anchor is let go. They resided but a short distance from the jetty, alongside which we were anchored; and it was therefore all the more curious that they should be conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps they did not care for such ephemeral excitement; what after all was a steamer to them as long as she landed the mail and mess-stores? Perhaps, too, the ordeal was too much for them; I myself knew the envy and misery attendant on seeing off a friend “homeward bound;” straining one’s eyes after the ship that drops slowly down to the sea, and then returning to purgatory!