AND THE MALAY STATES 17 



them would give me of their various skin diseases, so I hired the priest 

 for a rupee to keep them all at a distance, until we were on our way out, 

 which he did. 



The drive to Mount Lavinia was so full of novel scenes that it is 

 almost impossible to select even a few that are typical. Through the 

 narrow streets, crowded with native houses, from which swarmed half- 

 clad men and women, and nude children, meeting Tamils, Singalese, 

 Chinese, Moors indeed all types of black and yellow men, turning out 

 for carriages of all sorts, jinrikishas, bullock hackeries and huge two- 



NATIVE METHOD OF TREE CLIMBING. 



wheeled thatched-roof wains, getting a glimpse of a rare tropical garden, 

 then of a squalid Tamil hut, by Chinese graveyards, European villas, 

 cocoanut plantations, banana patches all over a road of good hard "cha- 

 "bok," we went, until we drew up at the little hotel^crowned height of 

 Mount Lavinia. Here we had tiffin, with coffee, out on the lawn under an 

 umbrella-like tent, where we lay in reclining chairs and watched the 

 sapphire sea studded with native fishing boats, their huge brown sails 

 swelling with the breath of the northeast monsoon. It was scorching 

 "hot in the sun, so we waited until late in the afternoon, and drove slowly 

 back to the hotel. 



