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Into the stillness the heralds proclaimed that next day the funeral games of Murmex Lucro would be celebrated in the Colosseum where he had died; that all persons entitled to seats in the Colosseum were thereby enjoined to attend, unless too ill to leave their homes: that all should come without togas, but, in sign of mourning for Murmex, wearing over their garments full-length, all- enveloping rain-cloaks of undyed black wool and similarly colored umbrella hats; that any person failing to attend so habited would be severely punished; that the show would be worth seeing, for, in honor of the Manes of Murmex, to placate his ghost, no defeated fighter would be spared and all the victors of the morning would fight each other in the afternoon.

As we floated down the mighty stream, a violent thunderstorm broke over our heads with the suddenness characteristic of the country. We were wet to the skin before we could get at the rain-cloaks on which we were sitting, but our boatmen remained as dry as ever, to our mystification.

It was about midway of that four-mile march in the pouring rain that I saw by the roadside three immobile horsemen, their forms swathed in horsemen's rain-cloaks, their faces hidden under broad-brimmed rain-hats, lined up with their horses' noses barely a horse-length from the roadway, watching from a little knoll our column as it passed. The middle horseman of the three looked familiar.

And, in a big chest in each hovel, were good, new, clean tunics, cloaks, rain-cloaks, and with them sandals, shoes, hats, rain-hats and all sorts of clothing, not as if for slaves, but as if for middle-class farmers, prosperous and self-indulgent. We were dumbfounded at such abundance in such a place. By each bed in the hut was a chest.

A bed consists only of a mat and a mosquito-net. There are all the usual joss arrangements, and time is measured by the burning of joss-sticks. Several rain-cloaks, made of palm leaves, were hanging up. These, and nearly all the other articles consumed by this large population are imported from China.