I was in Upper Burma for some months before the war, and many a time I could get no meat at all. Living in a large town among prosperous people, I could get no flesh at all, only fish and rice and vegetables. When, after much trouble, my Indian cook would get me a few fowls, he would often be waylaid and forced to release them. An old woman, say, anxious to do some deed of merit, would come to him as he returned triumphantly home with his fowls and tender him money, and beg him to release the fowls. She would give the full price or double the price of the fowls; she had no desire to gain merit at another person's expense, and the unwilling cook would be obliged to give up the fowls. Public opinion was so strong he dare not refuse. The money was paid, the fowls set free, and I dined on tinned beef. And yet the villages are full of fowls. Why they are kept I do not know. Certainly not for food. I do not mean to say that an accidental meeting between a rock and a fowl may not occasionally furnish forth a dinner, but this is not the object with which they are kept--of this I am sure. You would not suppose that fowls were capable of exciting much affection, yet I suppose they are. Certainly in one case ducks were. There is a Burman lady I know who is married to an Englishman. He kept ducks. He bought a number of ducklings, and had them fed up so that they might be fat and succulent when the time came for them to be served at table. They became very fine ducks, and my friend had promised me one. I took an interest in them, and always noticed their increasing fatness when I rode that way. Imagine, then, my disappointment when one day I saw that all the ducks had disappeared. I stopped to inquire. Yes, truly they were all gone, my friend told me. In his absence his wife had gone up the river to visit some friends, and had taken the ducks with her. She could not bear, she said, that they should be killed, so she took them away and distributed them among her friends, one here and one there, where she was sure they would be well treated and not killed. When she returned she was quite pleased at her success, and laughed at her husband and me. This same lady was always terribly distressed when she had to order a fowl to be killed for her husband's breakfast, even if she had never seen it before. I have seen her, after telling the cook to kill a fowl for breakfast, run away and sit down in the veranda with her hands over her ears, and her face the very picture of misery, fearing lest she should hear its shrieks. I think that this was the one great trouble to her in her marriage, that her husband would insist on eating fowls and ducks, and that she had to order them to be killed.