IN THE SWAMPS 167 



menian tradesman. Here are a party of Klings, 

 half of them digging dirt which the other half 

 gather in baskets that they carry twenty or thirty 

 feet to a waiting cart. There is a jungle Malay, 

 bearing a packing basket that reaches from the top 

 of his head to below his waist line, who has come 

 to town with cocoanuts to exchange at the Chinese 

 shops for silver trinkets for his women kind, or 

 maybe a sarong of finer weave than his home loom 

 can make. Always the Chinese shops; and occa- 

 sionally the travelling restaurant made up of one 

 small box carrying charcoal fire, a second whose 

 half dozen drawers contain the menu, and both 

 borne on the Chinaman's shoulder, hanging from 

 the ends of a bamboo pole. Dressed in European 

 clothes, idly gossiping, lounges the Eurasian, son 

 of a white father and an Asiatic mother, who, 

 somewhat raised out of his mother's sphere, is 

 rarely qualified by temperament or character to 

 fit into that of his father, and thus, as a rule, lan- 

 guishes unhealthily,— a hybrid of discontented 

 mind and vitiated blood. 



Next to the Chinaman the most conspicuous ele- 

 ment of the cosmopolitan gathering is the Indian 

 chitty, or money-lender. He seems always to be 

 thin and tall, his height accentuated by the caste 

 costume of whitish gauze wound around his body 

 and hanging somewhere between belt and knee line. 



