292 By Stream and Sea. 



shield, trot about, their wares suspended in baskets from 

 a bamboo pole balanced over the shoulder. Sometimes it 

 is pork for the Chinamen, or rice, or fish, or fruit, or com- 

 pounds unmentionable, but apparently all fairly clean and 

 appetising, thus offered for sale by street cries which, in an 

 unknown tongue, have still a family resemblance to those 

 we have been accustomed to in the well-beloved thorough- 

 fares afar off. 



Here comes a regular Chinese swell, a young placid-faced 

 Flowery-lander, into whose pigtail has been woven scarlet 

 silk, as a recognized hall-mark of gentility. He is attired 

 in the wide loose trousers and wide loose smock charac- 

 teristic of the clothes-wearing Chinaman in every quarter of 

 the globe, but the materials are of exquisitely fine silk or 

 cloth, and not the simple glazed stuff of the commonality. 

 Moreover, his head is surmounted by a natty drab English 

 deer-stalker, and his umbrella and fan are of dainty work- 

 manship. Then we have a native policeman, a Malay, or 

 more probably a Kling, in the blue uniform of " the force," 

 leading by their pigtails a couple of handcuffed thieves, 

 upon whom the scantily-robed shop people come out to 

 look with that expression of sweet smiling innocence which 

 is as characteristic of the Chinaman as are his pigtail and his_ 

 queerly-placed eyes. 



At night there are certain streets all ablaze with lamps — 

 a kind of Oriental New Cut, where everybody sits on his 

 haunches and takes life easy, giving or receiving the pur- 

 chased banana, cocoa nut, mangosteen, pine-apple, durian, 

 orange, betel nut, and leaf wrapper, with an air of supreme 

 indifference on both sides. The durian is the fruit by which 

 some Europeans swear, while others hate it with a bitter 

 hatred. They say you have first to overcome the stench of 

 the thing, and they say truly ; a skunk is nothing to it. The 



