Note 65 — APPENDIX. (continued 2)

This belief pervades the every-day thinking of the most ignorant Burmese. An English officer writes, that justjust before the drop fell with a wretched murderer, he himself heard him mutter as his last word, “May my next existence be a man’s, and a long one!” An old woman, whose grown-up 66son had died, thought that she recognized that son’s voice in the bleating of a neighbor’s calf. She threw her arms about the animal, and purchasing it, cherished it until its death, as the living embodiment of her own child.