TRAVELS IN 
women are left to themselves in another. The poor children 
scramble as well as they can among the slaves, to whom 
they are consigned, one in one room, and another in an- 
bther ; each, in the better sort of families, having its proper 
slave, called its tnja, a Malay term, borrowed, perhaps, from 
the Portuguese or Italian, signifying nurse or protectress; 
and, by an inevitable consequence, the aya is looked up to 
through life with more aflection than the natural parents. 
Little as character is regarded, they are extremely tenacious 
of their rank. More quarrels have arisen about ladies taking 
precedency in the church, or placing their chairs nearest the 
pulpit, than on any other occasion. In the government of 
Lord Macartney a serious dispute arose on this subject, be- 
tween the ladies of the Landrost or Chief Magistrate of the 
district, and of the Minister of the parish ; and memorial was 
presented after memorial on both sides, stating their mutual 
claims and mutual grievances. His Lordship, feeling the de- 
licacy of interposing his authority between two ladies of such 
high rank, recommended a compromise, suggesting, in case 
that should not go down, that he would be under the necessity 
of adopting the decision of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, 
when on a somewhat similar occasion he settled a dispute of 
precedency between two women of fashion at Brussels ; " Let 
" the greater simpleton of the two have the pas which made 
the two ladies prodigiously civil to each other ever afterwards, 
both striving which should give, instead of take, the prece- 
dency. A Dutch nobleman, who is the only titled man in 
the colony, and who held in the old government one of the 
