found a vocation in perambulating the streets with
hens’ feathers in their ears, which they thrust into the
ashes, “ and if a feather was curled up by the heat,
it meant blackmail upon the spot.” Any effort to
resist such exactions only led to worse ones at the
hands of the town wuns. Each officer of note kept
stocks in his yard, into which people were incontinently
thrust on the most frivolous grounds ; and the Rev. C.
Bennet, to whose notes I am indebted, paints a quaint
picture of stern parents and surly husbands suddenly
put into stocks at the private instigation of their
frivolous wives and unfilial children. To revenge one s
self upon a friend it was only necessary, it seems, to
speak a word into the covetous ear of one of the
town wuns.
In 1841 the stockade was removed a mile or more
inland from the river. Eleven-years later it was carried
at the point of the bayonet by the British troops.
Traces of its earthworks may still be seen crbssing
the Prome road, where the Rangoon golfer pursues
his dusty vocation. Rangoon was now incorporated
in the British Empire, and definitely launched upon
that career of prosperity which, in half a century, has
lifted it to a city of a quarter of a million people and
the position of third seaport in the Indian Empire.
Life moves in its streets and waterways ; prosperity,
linbroken yet by any adverse fortune, smiles upon it ;
high hopes are entertained by all its citizens of a near
future of still greater and almost boundless fortune.
Every time that one who knows it returns to it, after
66
-»> Its Beginnings
a lapse of even a year or two, he is struck with its
growth in the interval, with its new buildings, its new
streets, its new institutions, and its new pride. Yet its
PALMS IN AD V E R S IT Y
new buildings at least should teach it humility. For
a wave of terrible architecture has for some years been
passing over the devoted city, and cathedrals, town
halls, and public offices have been growing up which
are a torment to the eye.