summoned
courage to run in and transfix the body with his spear. Little cared the
Dato' Kaya Biji Derja, however, for his soul had 'past to where beyond
these voices there is peace.'

He had killed his wife, Che' Long, the Kelantan man Abdul Rahman, Pa'
Pek, Ma' Pek, Tungku Long Pendekar, Ma' Chik, Haji Mih, and Semail; and
had wounded his baby child, his mother-in-law, Che' Long's daughter
Esah, and Saleh. This is a sufficiently big butcher's bill for a single
man, and he had done all this because he had had words with his wife,
and, having gone further than he had intended in the beginning, felt
that it would be an unclean thing for him to continue to live upon the
surface of a comparatively clean planet. A white man who had stabbed his
wife in the heat of the moment might not improbably have committed
suicide in his remorse, which would have been far more convenient for
his neighbours; but that is one of the many respects in which a white
man differs from a Malay.

THE FLIGHT OF CHEP, THE BIRD

When my foe is in my hands,
When before me pale he stands,
When he finds no means to fight,
When he knows that death awaits him
At the hands of one who hates him,
And his looks are wild with fright;
When I stare him in the eyes,
Watch the apple fall and rise
In the throat his hard sobs tear;
O, I'll mark his pain with pleasure,
And I'll slay him at my leisure,
But I'll kill, and will not spare.

_The Song of the Savage Foeman._

In a large Sakai camp on the Jelai river, at a point some miles above
the last of the scattered Malay villages, the annual Harvest Home was
being held one autumn night in the Year of Grace 1893. The occasion of
the feast was the same as that which all tillers of the soil are wont to
celebrate with bucolic rejoicings, and the name, which I have applied to
it, calls up in the mind of the exile many a well-loved scene in the
quiet country land at Home. Again he sees the loaded farm carts
labouring over the grass or rolling down the leafy lanes, again the
smell of the hay is in his nostrils, and the soft English gloaming is
stealing over the land. The more or less intoxicated reapers astride
upon the load exchange their barbarous badinage with those who follow
on foot; the pleasant glow of health, that follows upon a long day of
hard work in the open air, warms the blood; and in the eyes of all is
the light of e