They are generally frightened by a camera, but it is a strange thing that no where do the priests object to having their photographs taken and printed. In fact, as soon as they learn the nature of the apparatus they become a perfect nuisance by the eagerness they express to be photographed. They will come every morning to the tent or hut where the photographer is encamped, dressed in their best Sunday robes, and wait about all day, in the hope of being "taken." They express considerable astonishment at the coloured and inverted picture seen on the ground-glass screen at the back of the camera, and they are unable to understand why prints cannot be instantaneously produced. A very picturesque old Peguan was once entreated to sit for his portrait by a man who was travelling. The ancient one hesitated, and thought, and consulted his family. He was allowed to look through the ground glass and see the faces of a few of his friends thereon. That decided the point. He threw his fears and scruples to the winds, and posed himself in a graceful attitude astride a water-jar. The photographer focussed and adjusted his machine, snapped the shutter, shut up the slide, and exclaimed, "It is finished." Then the old man came up to have a look. When he found that his picture was not ready at once, he felt that he had been grossly deceived, and his remarks were such that the photographer deemed it wise to seek for the company of his friends. The sight of the coloured picture on the ground-glass screen of the camera, led a few villagers to commit an amusing error. After looking at it for some time, they went to another spot to watch an artist who was at work there at the same time. They decided amongst themselves that his work was a superior form of photography, and that as he drew his brushes across the canvas they made the coloured picture come up through the back. Their theory worked excellently for a while, but when the artist began to put in boats in places in the picture which did not correspond to those in the landscape, they felt that the machine had gone wrong, and departed, murmuring that it wasn't a very good "picture-box" after all. CHAPTER X. THE CULTIVATION OF RICE.