And yet it was simple. They tied a string to its tail, and dipped it into the fire, twisting the string. They did not clean it first, and the process may have carbonized the outside, but I am certain it could not have more than warmed the flesh. I am aware that travellers (it is expected of thenı) partake of all strange meats; but as I would never taste in China of their gaunt, garbage-fed pariah dogs, so now I refused raw rat.

The encampment was on a ridge, as I have said. This ridge, like a half-completed barrage, partly blocked the course of a long valley, which lay between the mountains for several miles north and south. Northwards it runs up to the flank of the cloud-capped mountain, where, in the blueness, a brown patch like the one we stood upon was just distinguishable. Between us and it there were only the tree-tops in endless monotony-green-gray, browngray, blue-gray. One forest head stood up at a mile distance, the color of pink hawthorn.

A rainstorm coming up the valley as we watched blotted out the distance, and despatched a chillier breath to forewarn us. They in the hut were intent upon their rice, but they shivered, as it were, mechanically. I could have wished it were possible, a good thick sweater apiece now. looked at the signor, and the same thought was passing through his mind, I verily believe; but he only shivered melodramatically, and all he said was, "Breeze 'e go!"

I

So we departed, having shaken hands all round, for my guide is not concerned with the wellbeing of their bodies alone; he also holds himself responsible for his people's manners. Of the series of misfortunes which befell us next day as we went home, and which culminated, as late and hungry we reached the ninth mile, in the non-appearance of our gharries, leaving us so much

farther to walk in the downpour of rain--of these I will make no long story:

Me list nat of the chaf nor of the stree Maken so long a tale, as of the corn.

If any one familiar with the Upland People were asked to give a description of them, he would, I believe, make first mention of their inoffensiveness. Pugnacity seems to be an idea foreign to them. They possess a deadly weapon, the blow-pipe; but I never heard of its being turned against a fellowman. It may be that the severity of their life has been sufficient to keep down their numbers; the jungle being wide enough for all, competition has never enforced the lesson that the fighter alone is fit to survive. The same gentleness governs their household relationships. As they have not to fight for their sustenance, so they need not for their wives, of which there are enough to go round; and their unaggressive nature would revolt from the idea of stealing or ravishing another man's wife from him. I happen to have heard of one case which, under more auspicious circumstances. might have provided sufficient scandal for a six-shilling novel. The signor told it me. In a household that he knew there lived two men, and a girl who was married to one of them. The girl and her husband used to sit side by side, and the other man and his mother sat on the opposite side of the fire. After some weeks of absence the signor revisited that house and found the husband sitting alone, while the man who used to look at the girl sat with her by the fire. "How is this?" he asked the girl; "you sit with a stranger and your husband sits alone." "Oh," said the husband, "that is as it should be; she is no longer my wife, but is married to my friend." "But how can that be?" "Why," said the good, easy

man, "her heart think one, my heart thinks other, how can we live together? We must fall ill! Oh, very sorry." So the difficulty arranged itself without calling any high passions into play. Divorce being without rancor and so easy, jealousy is a superfluous emotion among these people, and the women in consequence enjoy a social freedom that is almost emancipation. I forgot to say that the formation of the girls' dance above described was interrupted by the arrival of a stranger Sakai, who stalked in between them. Half in fun, half anger, they fell upon him and buffeted him heartily with their bunches of leaves. I instantly looked at their husbands for some sign of disapproval; but not a bit.

But the signor's approval of them goes further than anything I have yet said. His father fought under Garibaldi, and the son, earnestly hopeful of a new dispensation, found here in the mountain the archetype of all he dreams that Italy shall become, "no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches, or of povertie," no soldiery, no police, no Pope. It is the true Socialism, and they the Primitive Socialists.

With all respect to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a free life in the forest does not appear to me calculated to produce the physique of a Mowgli. Of these people I only saw one much over five feet high, the women being proportionately smaller. While capable, as might be expected, of long fasts and forced marches, they are far from muscular, with skinny arms and legs no bigger than an English boy's of fourteen. Generally speaking, the men's development appears arrested,-narrow shoulders, feminine hairless features. In color they are of a brown rather lighter than the Malays, with glossy black hair (when clean), which hangs in curls over their ears and upon their necks, giving an appearance of dispro

portionate size to their heads, and so making them look still more like children. On the whole, they are far from ill-looking, though their foreheads are low, with heavy superciliary ridges; their noses are flat, insignificant and negroid. Their mouths are wide, but often beautifully shaped, and they differ noticeably from Malays and Chinese by keeping them habitually shut. But that which most strikes an Englishman on coming into contact with these little creatures, and which draws him at once towards them, is the remarkable openness and candor of their expression. They look at a stranger neither defiantly nor in any way cringing, but carefully and steadily, as if ready for unforeseen action on his part; but when they are reassured, with an expression that is dignified in its simplicity.

Their language, as far as my infantile Vocabulary goes, seems monosyllabic and dissyllabic; it is spoken in a jerky, explosive manner, and contains many nasal sounds. Some words sounded very like Chinese, and I strongly suspect that it is connected through Siamese with that language. There do not seem to be any inflexions. I experienced the usual difficulties in composing my vocabulary. Thus: I asked the Sakai for "I" and got the reply "eng" at once, but when I tried to get "we" they were quite at a loss; and when to explain myself I said in Malay, "For instance, we have all come from the river," they answered No or Yes as the case might be, and we became involved in a spillikin-heap of cross-purposes. They have only the first three numerals, nenok, nar, nir, in their own tongue; the rest they borrow from the Malay.

Beyond a love of beads and bright colors, their æsthetic faculties seem undeveloped; only on the butts of their bamboo combs and on their blowpipes they scratch patterns obviously in

tended to represent the shoots of bamboo. I tried the experiment of drawing a wild boar and showing it them. It was not worthy of a Rosa Bonheur I know, but still recognizable I thought, on account of the tusks; it was received with the blankest misapprehension. I tried again with an elephant, and this time successfully. "Gajah," they cried, pointing triumphantly to his tail and trunk.

Ignorant, unprogressive, inoffensive, it is very understandable how such a people were dispossessed by the fierce Malays as they came up the rivers into the country, and were driven before them up the mountains. Here they remained, subject to frequent Blackwood's Magazine.

and murderous raids, until, after the lapse of centuries, the English in their turn came up the rivers.

It is now some months since I visited the Upland People, but they are not easy to forget. Their blowpipes I could not ask them to part with-it is not fair to leave them without means of hunting their small deer. Instead I brought back for a keepsake a necklace; it was Pa Ntoné's, a dozen glass beads on a bit of jungle string. The pendant is a coin the size of a sixpence, apparently of tin. On the one side is a lion rampant. On the reverse is HOL-LAN-DIA, 1791. I wish I knew the history of this battered token. Edward A. Irving.

Perak, 25th April, 1900.

Pall Mall Gazette.

II.

Up in her room, which she occupied in common with Wilhelmina, she placed the picture on her commode which stood against the wall between the two beds. Her sewing box,-a shell, in which she kept her thimble, a needle case of red satin, a carved watch case, without any watch, and her own photograph in a wooden frame with some dried flowers pasted on it she pushed aside. The white frame pleased her very much. But the picture she tried to examine it. Which was the top and which the bottom she now knew. She also was able to tell which was the face, the head a little inclined, and an arm and a book, and quite a way below on the leaf two hands, which did not entirely belong, there. She looked at it and shook her own blond head and took the photograph opposite. The expressionless, ordinary portrait in the Sunday dress with the gold confirmation brooch-that pleased her better. And now she placed the little looking glass on the window and compared herself with both and smiled. So entirely smooth and holiday-like as the photograph she was not. But still-so homely as the Parisian young lady with the loosened hair she certainly could not see that she was. One scarcely knew whether the person there had on a dress or not. How could Hubert see any resemblance and the Frau Doctor also right away? She could discover none. And she was right glad that she could not. Hang the picture up, as the lady had advised? So that Wilhelmina could criticise it every morning and evening -no, no indeed! But she would write

* Translated for The Living Age by Adene Williams.

to him. Since the Frau Doctor had said it was like her she understood better how it was meant--he thought of her in everything, as he had told her before that he would do-even in the wonderful strokes there on the leaf. He loved her. This the Frau Doctor had also discovered. And she loved him. She took the picture in the white frame and kissed it. No matter what it was, so long as it came from him. She would not have been more glad of a hat, she said to herself. What he gave her and might give her, was good and lovely. What had he not already done for her! The young creature thought of every walk with him, of the matinee at the theatre, of the costly restaurant, in which she had placed her feet shyly enough, and of the good things to eat to which she was so unaccustomed. And then she thought how he had remained with her alone, even till late in the night, and at parting had taken her hand in his and kissed her finger tips. She was grateful to him for that. She would willingly have held up her lips to him, her whole face. But it flattered her that he did not wish this, because he considered her beautiful, distinguished. That he had not given much to her, as a bridegroom generally gave his girl, no brooch-the old one from her confirmation she had long ago given to her little sister Lina-and no good woollen dress, that was also because he was so different from others, so entirely himself. Often she did not understand him entirely. As, when he admired her simple dress, praising her that she needed no arts of the toilette. And still less, when he had once said, that when she became his wife, she must always dress in plain, softly tinted colors, black and gray, and in summer nothing

but white with a little lilac. She had secretly wished that for once she might have a blue dress, a real beautiful blue, of good wool, which would stay good a long time and that could be cleaned and when necessary turned. But certainly, when she was his wife, her dresses would not need to last so long. Then she would take one and give it away immediately when it did not please her and have a new one made, as the Frau Doctor did. And she knew already to whom she would give it: to Lina, her little Lina, who should certainly have the first one that he gave her. She wanted to laugh from pleasure, as she imagined how the child would rejoice. And she took the picture again and kissed it several times; "Oh, thou, thou!" As his wife she would be a real lady and could sleep in the mornings as long as she wished, her maid would make the fire and cook the coffee, and make the beds and sweep the floor and wipe off the dust, and she-what would she do? What all the ladies did, look at beautiful pictures, read, take walks-and nothing else. And Sundays go to the theatre. And always with him! If he was only here now, her Hubert, Hubert Ehren. Doctor Ehren and-Frau Doctorin!-"

She was frightened at herself, lest some one should have overheard the words that she had spoken out loud. And then she heard steps on the stairs, Wilhelmina's steps, and she hurriedly opened the drawer of the commode and shoved the picture in the white frame in between her two dresses and pushed the drawer to and locked it. She breathed more easily as Wilhelmina came and asked her in a vexed tone whether she had forgotten that it was Sunday evening, and all the table silver still lay in the drawing room on the window seat, and that Frau Doctor who formerly never came down, and who was so short sighted that she gen

erally saw nothing, had come down and noticed the disorder and had scolded her, Wilhelmina, and said that she must put it away at once, that it might be stolen.

"That did not please me. And I said that it was Lisbeth's work, and she said: Ah, indeed? and went out quickly and said nothing more. Now I want to know once why she scolds me and not you."

Lisbeth ran, nay, flew, down the steps and to her work. That she had just promised to go through the house in a moderate way, she had entirely forgotten.

So it was evening before she was able to write the necessary letter of thanks. It was late, the masters had company, Wilhelmina had laid herself on the bed to get a little sleep, and Lisbeth sat in the warm kitchen at the table near the cook Wea, who knitted diligently, only stopping from time to time, when a row was finished, to put her needle behind her ear and look at the girl through the great, round spectacles.

"So," said the latter at last, "so, that is finished."

"A hard work," remarked Wea, "if he only were not a Herr Doctor, almost like ours, then he would not have sent you the picture and you would not need to do that."

"No," said Lisbeth, "then I need not do it." She propped both elbows on the table, laid her head in the empty hands and stared silently for a while at the light of the petroleum lamp"but," and she again raised her head high, "then everything would be different, and I don't want that."

"No," remarked Wea, comfortably knitting, "for it is good so. But I wonder when you become a real madame, whether you will like it."

Lisbeth laughed. "I also wonder," she cried as she went out of the kitchen to the old woman, and waved her let