"Oh, they are no good at all. They have muddled everything up, and got it all wrong. That is why we are beginning to write tracts and send out missionaries. The great Buddha made no propaganda; neither did we for many, many centuries. We believe that people must grow into this knowledge; but now when you Western people come and take little bits of our system, and piece them together all wrong--well, then, we are forced to show you what is the truth! It is like a puzzle map, and all you theosophists are trying to fit the pieces in, wrong side upward." And she finished with a merry and apologetic laugh, remembering, no doubt, that I had spoken of having friends amongst these "stupid muddlers"! She gave me quite a number of the "tracts" of which she had spoken, setting forth the true Buddhism, and mostly printed in Mandalay, and I made a point of passing these on to some of the friends I had mentioned to her. I can only trust they were appreciated, and efficacious in reducing the confusion resulting from trying to adapt Eastern mysticism to Western consumption! Our conversation became still more interesting when I discovered that a mysterious fellow-passenger of ours on board the _Devonshire_, sailing from Marseilles to Rangoon, had taken this voyage at the expense of the Burmese lady, and, I am sorry to say, had occasioned her a great and quite inexcusable disappointment. This man, whom I will call Dr Groene, was a professor at a celebrated university in the south of Europe, and was certainly a scholar--if not a gentleman! He had studied the Buddhist writings very deeply, and his name had been conveyed to this Burmese lady as that of one eager to throw off all ties of kinship, and retire--like the great Buddha himself--from the world, and find repose and enlightenment in a Burmese monastery. The only thing lacking in carrying out this excellent resolve was--as usual--_money_. The native lady, delighted to hear of so learned a gentleman, and one holding such an honourable position in Europe, being converted to the tenets of her religion, and thus wishing to give the best example of their influence upon him, agreed joyfully to forward the funds for his journey and to make arrangements for his stay in Rangoon before proceeding to Mandalay, where he was to be received as a Buddhist priest after a certain course of initiation.