The poet went out weeping-the nightingale ceased chanting: Finally, when both man and bird are dead, the music left in the place Was only of the poet's song, and not the nightingale's. The fable may be construed literally. A halo of poetry has been thrown round this earthly minstrel by the love and tuneful worship of the heavenly poets. She has found a passage from her soul to man, and many an answering note is mingled with her native strain, giving it a richness and variety of suggestion that is not surpassed in any natural sound. Her song is thus, for the cultivated, in harmony with the noblest emotions-hope and remorse, devotion to the dead, and passionate love of the living. It trembles with the pathos of Catullus, and swells with the rapture of Keats. Like a voice from higher levels of life, it rings out the fateful warnings of an unheeded Cassandra against the littleness and tyranny of men, and then thrills us with such an exquisite tenderness of hope and love that "the nightingales awake" in our own hearts, and fill us with joy. * Mrs. Browning, The Poet and the Bird. C. J. BILLSON. The Hill Tribes of Burma. THE ordinary idea of nomadic tribes is that they are a lazy, shiftless race, who wander about seeking pasturage for their flocks, and occasionally, like the Huns, Arabs, and Tartars, vary the monotony of their existence by waging wars of conquest on the peaceful, settled inhabitants of the cultivated plains. Nomads, therefore, on the whole bear but a very indifferent character. Such roving bands as the Kurds, Finns, or Gauchos are held to be, indeed, a little superior in civilisation to mere hunters or fishermen, but immeasurably below the dwellers in the lowlands, who support themselves by agriculture and manufactures. But this generalisation is apt to be mistaken in some cases. The hill tribes of Burma are cultivators of the soil, and gather in their harvests with much hard work and trouble, yet they are as homeless and doomed to roam as any Bedouin or Mongolian of them all. Rice can be grown on the fat plain-lands year after year with never diminished return, and no greater labour than is implied in turning loose a number of buffaloes or oxen to poach up the soft ground with their hoofs, as an easy substitute for ploughing; and later on setting the women and young children to plant out the young seedlings from the paddy nursery, an operation effected with a little knobbed stick and not incompatible with smoking a cigar. But on the steep hill-sides it is a very different matter. There the jungle grows fast and dense, and the torrent rains wash away all the soil that is not held together by the roots of vegetable growth of some kind. About the month of February the hill people have to set about clearing the jungle from the slopes near their temporary village. Year after year it is the same, for when one crop has been grown the wornout soil must lie fallow for seven summers and winters before it will yield a harvest again. Therefore, when the cold weather is drawing to a close, each householder selects the patch which he proposes to cultivate and sets about cutting down the jungle on it. It is hard work in any case, but perhaps least so when the trees are very large. This would seem puzzling to an ordinary woodman, but is explained by the ingenious device of these experienced foresters. They cut a slight notch on the under side of the bottom row of trees, and proceed upwards, for the clearing is always on a slope, cutting gradually deeper and deeper into the stems, and leaving as a rule the smaller trees untouched, until they come to the top of the patch, where the tree-trunks are completely cut through and, falling on those below, snap them over, and so the whole acre or two of forest goes down with one great grinding crash. Even with this lightening of the toil it takes many days, but by the end of April the jungle has been cut long enough to be dry and ready for burning. But still the anxieties of the cultivator are not at an end, and considerable judgment has to be exercised in even so seemingly slight a matter as choosing the time to set fire to the miscellaneous heap. The huge tree-trunks require a lot of burning, and often smoulder for long over a week. If the timber is fired too long before the rains come, the ashes become dry and light, and are carried off by the wind, so that a great portion of the fertilising element is lost, and only a very scanty crop is the result. If, on the other hand, the kindling is too long delayed, the rain comes and extinguishes the flames. Great half-charred logs cumber the ground, and the undergrowth becomes soppy and wet, and will not burn at all, and a more or less total failure of the harvest is the result, with most direful consequences to the farmer. This hill rice cultivation is therefore a terribly uncertain support, and yet there is little to replace it; for tea and coffee plantations, even if the tribesmen had the requisite skill and experience, would have but a very doubtful chance of success; besides that you cannot eat tea-leaves or grow fat on coffee-beans, and the lowland Burmans would hardly barter a sufficient quantity of rice, the staple of Oriental life, for such commodities, and the hill community would therefore probably have to starve. But supposing all to go well-the mass of timber to be well burnt, the surface of the ground to be broken up by the heat, and the first rains to come immediately afterwards-there is abundance of hard work before the husbandman. The whole of the field has to be laboriously hoed with the rudely fashioned "mamootie" to mix in the ash manure, and then follows the sowing. In some few lucky places, found two or three times in the nomad's lifetime, this may be done by scattering broadcast; but in the great majority of districts it is a far more toilsome matter. Holes have to be dibbled in the ground—not the soft slime of the plains, but obstinate mountain soil-and into each hole a precious grain of rice is dropped. After a short time, when the young plants have sprung up a little above the surface, Indian corn, cotton, and capsicums are planted in between the ridges, to serve as a last resource in case the paddy crop should fail; and near the frail bamboo house, run up in a sheltered place hard by, there are yams, their tendrils creeping over some logs laid there for the purpose, a row or two of sugar-canes, somewhat stringy and sapless in such uncongenial ground, and a score or so of betel vines to supply the leaf wherein to wrap the areca nut, the fragment of tobacco and cutch, and the soupçon of lime which will, when chewed, furnish philosophy and resignation to the farmer if all does not go well. Even with the sowing the toil is not over. Occasionally the arid soil refuses to produce even one year's crop without irrigation, and artificial channels have to be dug and conducted through the clearing, and infinite care is necessary to prevent the water from carrying off all the earth with it. Then a small hut has to be built on posts in the middle of the field, and some member of the family has to be perpetually on watch there against birds and beasts. By day noisy flocks of buntings and screaming green parrots would fain devour the ripening grain, and by night herds of wild pigs would soon root up and destroy the whole field. In addition to this, if the rice is stunted in its growth the weeds are not. Two or three times during the summer the whole family has to turn out to rescue the corn from strangulation, and the youthful highlander is called upon at a very early age to learn botany enough to discriminate between young rice plants and tares. At length in September or October reaping commences, and the crop is gathered in and stacked up near the house in a sheltered place, where the wild mountain storms will not catch the stacks and scatter them over the hill-side. Threshing the grain out is not by any means the lightest part of the work. In the plains the lazy Burman places his sheaves in a double circle with the heads together, and his bullocks do the work for him, and he is not careful to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn the while he leisurely puffs a contemplative cheroot. But the hill men have neither buffaloes nor oxen, and must, therefore, patiently beat the ears against a log of wood, or humbly tread the paddy out with their own naked feet. The two methods are usually combined, for it is difficult to say which is the more wearisome and monotonous. Then at the end of the year, when at last the rice crop has been stored up, the hill men make visits to the low country, carrying down in long procession of Indian file betel nuts, fowls and pigs, wild honey and bees'-wax, wild cardamoms, and the like, wherewith to get themselves a little money, buy a little more rice perhaps, and some cheap cotton goods, and spare clothes against the cold weather, to supplement the poncho-like cloaks that the women weave for them from hill-grown cotton, comfortless garments with a hole for the head and clumsy folds reaching down to the knee. Now and then speculative Chinese pedlars toil up the mountain paths, with their baskets balanced over their shoulders on the bamboo sticks without which a Chinese coolie is useless; but there is small profit to be made out of the mountain wanderers, and such visits are looked upon as great events in nomad life, and Ah Gwan or Boon Tek, the Chinese packmen, newly set up in business as they are, will probably never make such ventures again. Then after a short season of leisure, chequered by carousals as long as the "khoung" or "sheroo" lasts, heady liquors occupying an intermediate position between spirits and beer, and an occasional opium pipe, got from the poppies which grow without any tending, the end of January comes round again, and the whole labour has to be gone through once more on a new piece of ground. In the course of three years at most the villagers have usually finished the cultivation of all the land in the immediate neighbourhood of their settlement, and it is necessary to seek out "fresh woods and pastures new" in a very literal sense of the word. Sacrifices are made to the spirits of the forest, the hills, and the air; the wise man of the community pitches on a lucky day, and the elders are sent out to search for a new locality. They separate and each goes his own way, prospecting until he finds a place which seems to him suitable. He takes a clod of earth and carries it back with him, and when all have returned each elder puts his clod of earth under his pillow at night, and awaits a favourable omen in his sleep. Next morning all the dreams are compared, and the most promising of these determines the site to which the village shall be removed. If an elephant, or a vulture, or any gaycoloured or unusual wild animal, figures in a dream, it is a good presage; so is a loaded cart or a can full of water, a dog or a goat eating, a man carrying meat or sugar. On the other hand, a goldsmith, a barber, a carpenter, a cotton cleaner, a smith, a tailor, are most ill-omened sights, on the principle that such handicraftsmen have nothing to do with the hill tribes, and suggest nothing so much as migration to the plains to escape starvation. An equally unlucky vision is a widow or a corpse, an empty jar or a man carrying weapons of any kind, butter, oil, or milk. Such details have to be carefully considered, for it is very seldom that the elders dream dreams bearing obviously on the shifting of the village, and it is necessary to seek a sign in the other manifestations. Very knotty points occasionally turn up, as when the dreamer sees a heavilyloaded cart, but the vehicle capsizes, or has a vision of a dead body surrounded by vultures. The good has then to be weighed against the bad, and "leading cases have to be adduced, a book of which precedents every wise man of any credit always has about him. The estimation in which the vulture is held, it may be mentioned, arises from the fact that he is a good Buddhist, and never takes "the breath of fleeting life," but prefers to live in ascetic fashion on carrion. If none of the dreams give hope, or point exclusively to any particular place, the men are sent to spy out the land again and seek inspiration as before. If the result is once more unsatisfactory, recourse is had to another method. A fowl is cooked with great solemnity, and the pioneers sit down to eat it together. It does not take long to get through it. The bones are picked quite clean, and are then broken in pieces and thrown into a basket or an earthenware jar. Out of this each of the elders takes a fragment after the village diviner has recited some "mantras" and incantations over it. The man who draws out the largest piece of bone is designated as he who is to lead out the people, and the place he has hit upon is adopted for the new settlement. The few household goods are soon gathered together, the village is broken up, and the whole community sets out to the new site thus chosen. New huts of wattled bamboo with thatched roofs coming close down to the ground are run up in a day or two, and then the available rice-land-now dense forest-is allotted among the householders, or if, as is more frequently the case, the soil is cultivated in common, the leader assigns to each his particular share of the work and everything goes on quietly and peaceably. The sept seldom wanders very far from its original range of hills. The nomadic changes usually take place up or down the course of some mountain stream, from which fish can be |