270 THE AW ISLANDS. [chap, xxxii. 



thigh are used at pleasure to rest the foot. Two or three 

 played very skilfully, keeping the ball continually flyiug 

 about, but the place was too confined to show off the game 

 to advantage. One evening a quarrel arose from some 

 dispute in the game, and there was a great row, and it 

 was feared there would be a fight about it — not two men 

 only, but a party of a dozen or twenty on each side, a 

 regular battle with knives and krisses ; but after a large 

 amount of talk it passed off quietly, and we heard nothing 

 about it afterwards. 



Most Europeans being gifted by nature with a luxuriant 

 oTOwth of hair upon their faces, think it disfigures them, 

 and keep up a continual struggle against her by mowing 

 down every morning the crop which has sprouted up 

 during the preceding twenty-four hours. Now the men of 

 Mongolian race are, naturally, just as many of us want to 

 be. They mostly pass their lives with faces as smooth and 

 beardless as an infant's. But shaving seems an instinct of 

 the hixman race ; for many of these people, having no hair 

 to take off their faces, shave their heads. Others, how- 

 ever, set resolutely to work to force nature to give them a 

 beard. One of the chief cock-fighters at Dobbo was a 

 Javanese, a sort of master of the ceremonies of the ring, 

 who tied on the spurs and acted as backer-up to one of 

 the combatants. This man had succeeded, by assiduous 

 cultivation, in raising a pair of moustaches which were a 



