Burma is chiefly remarkable for a lizard that occasionally haunts the trees and houses there. Span-long or more, it has a head big out of all proportion compared with others of the lizard clans, and eyes that sometimes seem to follow you like owl’s eyes, and a loud voice. “Tuck-too!” it cries, “Tuck-too! Tuck-too!” without any variation, except an occasional repetition of the “oo-oo-oo” at the end, like a musician tuning his pipes.

It is considered very lucky to have such a lizard in your house; and as it is said to be fond of baby rats, and rats bring plague, the prejudice may have some foundation in fact. Its principal food is insects—a wholesome appetite too; but its great glory comes from the similarity of its cry, weak in consonants and loud in vowels, to the Burmese for Quite so. It is a great prophet. They say the rains can be foretold by counting its Quite sos; and if you are about to wed you [111] should ask it, “Is she good? Is she bad?” “Quite so, quite so,” says the prophet, impartial as Fate. But perverse, let it stop first; and if your last question to get “Quite so” is the question,—“Is she bad?” you should break off the marriage. They say that marriages have been broken off on this account; and assuredly, in many a village, you can see and hear the children with mock gravity keeping time to the tucktoo and crying in chorus,—“Is she good? Is she bad?”

Sometimes, like other prophets, it comes to church to speak, never to listen; and then it may be loudly heard, to the joy of the congregations rather than of the clergy. The rest of its history has been embalmed in a song by one of its friends:—