But even when I had learned by experience that if I wanted a quiet ride I must give the mules an hour's start of me I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts on any of the subjects that I had selected for meditation. Though nothing of the lease consequence happened my attention was distracted by a hundred trifling incidents of the wayside. Two big butterflies in black and white fluttered along in front of me, and they were like young war widows bearing the loss they had sustained for their country's sake with cheerful resignation: so long as there were dances at Claridge's and dressmakers in the Place Vendôme they were ready to swear that all was well with the world. A little cheeky bird hopped down the road turning round every now and then jauntily as though to call my attention to her smart suit of silver grey. She looked like a neat typist tripping along from the station to her office in Cheapside. A swarm of saffron butterflies upon the droppings of an ass reminded me of pretty girls in evening frocks hovering round an obese financier. At the roadside grew a flower that was like the Sweet William that I remember in the cottage gardens of my childhood and another had the look of a more leggy white heather. I wish, as many writers do, I could give distinction to these pages by the enumeration of the birds and flowers that I saw as I ambled along on my little Shan pony. It has a scientific air and though the reader skips the passage it gives him a slight thrill of self-esteem to know that he is reading a book with solid fact in it. It puts you on strangely familiar terms with your reader when you tell him that you came across P. Johnsonii It has a significance that is almost cabalistic; you and he (writer and reader) share a knowledge that is not common to all and sundry and there is the sympathy between you that there is between men who wear masonic aprons or Old Etonian ties. You communicate with one another in a secret language. I should be proud to read in a footnote of a learned work on the botany or ornithology of Upper Burma, Maugham, however, states that he observed F. Jonesia in the Southern Shan States. But I know nothing of botany and ornithology. I could, indeed, fill a page with the names of all the sciences of what I am completely ignorant. A yellow primrose to me, alas! is not primula Vulgaris, but just a small yellow flower, ever so faintly scented with the rain, and grey balmy mornings in February when you have a funny little flutter in your heart, and the smell of the rich wet Kentish earth, and kind dead faces, and the statue of Lord Beaconsfield in his bronze robes in Parliament Square, and the yellow hair of a girl with a sweet smile, hair now grey and shingled.
I passed a party of Shans cooking their dinner under a tree. Their wagon were placed in a circle round them, making a kind of laager, and the bullocks were grazing a little way off. I went on a mile or two and came upon a respectable Burman sitting at the side of the road and smoking a cheroot. Round him were his servants, with their loads on the ground beside them, for he had no mules and they were carrying his luggage themselves. They had made a little fire of sticks and were cooking the rice for his midday meal. I stopped while my interpreter had a chat with the respectable Burman. He was a clerks from Keng Tung on his way to Taunggyi to look for a situation in a government office. He had been on the road for eighteen days and with only four more to go looked upon his journey as nearly at an end. Then a Shan on horseback threw confusion among the thoughts I tried to marshal. He rode a shaggy pony and his feet were bare in his stirrups. He wore a white jacket and his coloured skirt was tucked up so that it looked like gay riding breeches. He had a yellow handkerchief bound round his head. He was a romantic figure cantering through that wide upland, but not so romantic as Rembrandt's Polish Rider who rides through space and time with so gallant a bearing. No living horseman has ever achieved that effect of mystery so that when you look at him you feel that you stand on the threshold of an unknown that lures you on and yet closes the way for you. Nor is it strange, for nature and the beauty of nature are dead and senseless things and it is only art that can give them significance.
But with so much to distract me I could not but suspect that I should reach my journey's end without after all having made up my mind upon a single one of the important subjects that I had promised myself to consider.
![Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARembrandt_-_De_Poolse_ruiter%2C_c.1655_(Frick_Collection).jpg "Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")