hostility of the Burmese towards the British
government. Slowly and sullenly it gathered
in the horizon; blacker and blacker, and spreading
farther and wider, as the warlike feeling
gained strength, and the " braves" of the empire
grew impatient to meet their enemies in war.
With the confidence of the ignorant they
believed that to meet was to conquer; and could
not be brought to understand that ever a nation
living was superior to themselves. They had
heard of the fabulous wealth of Calcutta, and
every fighting man was inflamed with the desire
to make one in the sack which was so sure to
follow, if they could but be brought face to face
with their enemies in the field. And not even
when hostilities actually broke out, and the
British were the victors, would they be
convinced of the possibility of being conquered.
As time went on they were made to pay dearly
for their confidence.

While this war feeling was seething through
the land, Mr. Gouger's position at court became
slightly less pleasant. The chief queen, who
had never been one of his cordial friends, showed
herself now disposed to become one of his active
enemies, and contrived the insult of a false
charge and imprisonment, until he should gain
his release by a bribe. This was an indication
of the change approaching, as were the lowering
looks and ill-concealed murmurs of the people
whenever he stirred abroad; so he began to
shut himself up in his house, sending out his
servant, the Red Rat, to sound the dispositions
of the public, and hear what was said about
him and the other white men in the city.

The Red Rat heard what was so little
satisfactory, that Mr. Gouger had nothing for it but
to face the storm, and guide himself in the best
manner possible through the thorny paths he had
to tread. And then Rangoon was bombarded,
and the spirit of the nation boiled over. For want
of a better pretext, Mr. Gouger was accused of
being a spy, and all sorts of evidence was
tortured most ingeniously to flavour the accusation
with sufficient legal proof. While waiting and
expecting every moment to be arrested or
murdered, he one night heard a terrific
uproar. A vast multitude came down the street,
hooting and yelling, and uttering fierce
imprecations, while beating against the outside of the
house, as if they would stave the framework in.
Soon, this kind of attack extended along the
whole street, much to the terror of the foreigner,
who thought that, of a surety, his foes had lost
patience with the law, and were coming to work
their own will unmolested. But he found out
that this was only their way of exorcising the
cholera, which to them was an evil spirit who
might be frightened and driven out if they but
showed a brave front and were not afraid. We
do not hear that their yelling, and drumming,
and beating with sticks, and fiery oaths, had the
desired effect, or that the cholera, any more than
the British soldiers, was to be exorcised by
noise and repelled by big words. This night
of terror passed; but on the twenty-eighth of
May, eighteen hundred and twenty-three, the
crisis came. A body of men entered his house,
seized him as their prisoner, and marched him
off to the court of justice, there to be examined
concerning his treachery and disloyalty. He
knew now that there was no escape; the rest
was only a question of time and temper. After
a little cat-and-mouse play—always under the
colour of strict legality—and after the prisoner
had put himself and his guard in the wrong by
bribing them to let him have a midnight visit
to his own home—which midnight visit was of
course discovered, according to the laws of evil
fate, the magistrate choosing that very night
whereon to examine him—the mask was flung
away. A gang of boisterous ruffians rushed
into the prison where he sat with his feet in the
stocks, and began fighting with the soldiers for
everything that belonged to him. When he
tried to protect himself, and to save his few
personals, they told him, with a sneer, that he
need not give himself the trouble; he was going
to the Death Prison, and would not long need
any of them. They even tried to strip him
of his clothes; but he managed to retain his
shirt and trousers; and thus, half naked, his
arms tied behind his back with a piece of cord,
barefooted and bareheaded, he was led to the
criminal hall of justice to hear his sentence. He
was not suffered to ascend the steps of the court-
house, but was made to squat down in front,
while his name and crime were entered in the
prison list; and then the sad procession moved
forward to the gate of the Let-ma-yoon, or
Death Prison, nearly opposite. Well might his
flesh creep and his heart quail for fear at his
entrance into this Let-ma-yoon, "Hand! shrink
not," as it was only too justly called. The very
name, in its terrible suggestiveness, caused the
most frantic terror in all who were condemned
to its bloodstained walls; and not the most
cowardly Burmah of them all but would have
preferred death to imprisonment in the Let-ma-
yoon. And the name was even less appalling
than the thing. Of this jail the guards were
themselves the worst malefactors, whose lives had
been spared on consideration of their undertaking
the office of common torturers and executioners.
They were not allowed to enter into any house,
and each bore the name of his crime, that
qualification of his office, tattooed across his breast, so
that escape for any of them was out of the
question: the ringed cheek and scarred breast would
have secured their recapture anywhere throughout
the empire. Degraded as they were, their
only chance of sanity and self-forgetfulness lay
in brutalising themselves to the utmost extent
possible, and they learnt their fatal lesson to
the last letter. The chief of the gang was a
lean, wiry, hard-featured man, across whose
breast was written, in unusually large characters,
"loo-that," murderer. This hoary villain
the prisoners and subordinates invariably
addressed as "Father." Even the Europeans
taught themselves to do the same, though with
many a struggle and many a bitter protest
of flesh and blood against the desecration.

Another of the Ring-cheeked was branded