I say he is liable continually to such attacks, but certain surroundings, and circumstances seem more conducive than others to such contemplative meditation.
For example, if despatched on an important message, such an attack almost invariably seizes him, and the messenger will remain for hours, seated by the road side lost in thought, while his impatient master sits raging and fuming at home, waiting in vain for an answer to his note. On such an occasion the Burman loses all sense of time, and his expression of naive astonishment, and patient martyr-like sufferance, when blamed for his delay, is utterly disarming.
Again, the dusting of a room is most conducive to meditation. I have frequently seen a native stand for half an hour or more, immovable, duster in hand, gazing from the window, lost in abstraction. But this trait, I am told by English housewives, is not confined to Burmese servants alone. Dusting, I conclude, has a soothing effect on the nerves.
When the Burman does work, he works with an energy and violence which is as astonishing as it is unnecessary. To see a loogalay in his energetic movements, dusting or tidying a room is a lesson to sluggards.
He takes his stand in the centre of the room, and performs a series of wonderfully intricate and far reaching flag signals with the duster. Then, after clearing away the broken china and other debris, he slowly makes a tour of the room, striking violently at each article of furniture once or twice with the corner of the afore-mentioned duster, and shaking the same menacingly in the face of every picture and ornament. Then he turns upside down the books and papers, carefully hides his mistress's work bag, and his master's favourite pipe, rearranges the furniture and the ornaments, which have come through scatheless, to suit his own taste, and the room is finished. In the matter of floor washing the Burman as a rule prefers to carry out the precepts stated in Mr. Chevallier's song: "What's the good of anything? Why nothing." To him it appears an act of supererogation to wash to-day the floor, which must certainly be dirtied again on the morrow.
But if he be induced, by the stern commands of his mistress to undertake the task, then indeed is it a day of mourning and discomfort for the whole household. No spring cleaning carried on by the most uncompromising and unsympathetic British matron, can approach the misery and upset caused by Burmese floor washing.