own furrows and whose very existence is often betrayed
only by the slow plod and turn of the scarlet and white
head-dressed yaks in the plough-yoke. Among these
people there is no shyness, scarcely even curiosity.
The spring work has to be done, and there is no one but
themselves to do it— perhaps the yaks can only be
borrowed from friend Tsering up at the hamlet for this
day ; perhaps, too, the lamas will exact their corvée
to-morrow. And there is much to do. Meanwhile
these strange foreigners can wait to be inspected.
Always, of course, there was civility as we rode by.
The Tibetan peasant’s manners are perfect. The small
boy jumps off the harrow upon which he has been
having a ride, and, stopping his song, bows with his
joined hands in front of his face, elbows up, and right
knee bent. A householder smiles, exhibits two inches of
tongue, and gives a Napoleonic salute as we pass by,
pulling his cap down over his face to his chest. Rosy-
backed and breasted sparrows fly in a twittering company
before us through the grey-white sallowthorn brake,
and a vivid golden wagtail flirts his tail beside a puddle.
Redstarts sit on the top of prayer poles, and hoopoes
flash black and white wings by the stream. Ruddy
sheldrake and bar-headed geese barely move aside from
a wet patch of recent plough-land as we approach, and
iridescent black-green magpies, half as large again as our
English luck-bringers, keep pace beside us with their
dipping flight. The sun is hard and vivid, and the flat
plain shivers a little in the heat, confusing the lines of
leafless willows beside a whitewashed mill. There
is promise of foliage, but no more. The houses are
streaked perpendicularly with wide welts of Indian red
and ash-grey, and long strings of many-coloured little
flags droop between their housetops and the nearest
tree. Tibetan “ mastiffs” bark from every roof until the
housewife quiets them with a stone. She throws better
than her European sister, in spite of a grimy coral and
turquoise halo round her head and a baby on her left arm.
The story of the last Sinchen Lama is one which it
is worth while to tell. He was the seventh in succession
of one of the most important secondary reincarnations
of Lamaism. His abode has always been at Dongtse,
but his predecessors were buried with great ceremony
each under a gilded chorten at Tashi-lhunpo, the metropolis
of the province of Tsang. The last Sinchen Lama
was the man who in 1882 received Sarat Chandra Das,
and extended to him continual patronage and hospitality.
In the narrative of his journey the famous spy refers
to him repeatedly as “ the minister.” He was, as a
matter of fact, minister of temporal affairs of the province
of Tsang at this time and a most important man.
On his way to his first interview with his patron
Chandra Das passed in the market place of Tashi-
lhunpo a party of prisoners loaded with chains,
pinioned by wooden clogs, and in some cases blinded.
It was an ugly omen of the end. To the Sinchen
Lama’s influence Chandra Das owed the facilities which
enabled him eventually to make his way to Lhasa,
and that he was not ungrateful is clear in every line
in which he refers to his patron. The minister seems
to have been in his way strangely like that enlightened
Grand Lama of Tashi-lhunpo who received Bogle
in 1774; he was anxious to improve his knowledge
of the world, and especially of English affairs; he even
attempted to learn our language, and he seems throughout
to have been a broad-minded, intelligent and sym