ers and the rice-fields; and
with the fisher-folk on the seashore. I have tried to describe these
things as they appear when viewed from the inside, as I have myself seen
them during the many dreary years that I have spent in the wilder parts
of the Malay Peninsula. It will be found that the pictures thus drawn
are not always attractive--what man's life, when viewed from the inside,
ever is pretty to look at? But I have told my tales of these curious
companions of my exile, nothing extenuating, but setting down nought in
malice.

The conditions of life of which I write, more especially in those
sketches and tales which deal with native society in an Independent
Malay State, are rapidly passing away. Nor can this furnish matter for
regret to any one who knew them as they were and still are in some of
the wilder and more remote regions of the Peninsula. One may, perhaps,
feel some measure of sentimental sorrow that the natural should here, as
elsewhere, be replaced by the artificial; one may recognise with
sufficient clearness that the Malay in his natural unregenerate state is
more attractive an individual than he is apt to become under the
influence of European civilisation; but no one who has seen the horrors
of native rule, and the misery to which the people living under it are
ofttimes reduced, can find room to doubt that, its many drawbacks
notwithstanding, the only salvation for the Malays lies in the increase
of British influence in the Peninsula, and in the consequent spread of
modern ideas, progress, and civilisation.

I feel this so strongly that, in common with many of my countrymen, I am
content to devote the best years of my life to an attempt to bring about
some of those revolutions in facts and in ideas which we hold to be for
the ultimate good of the race. None the less, however, this book has
been written in a spirit of the deepest sympathy with all classes of
Malays, and I have striven throughout to appreciate the native point of
view, and to judge the people and their actions by their own standards,
rather than by those of a White Man living in their midst.

With regard to the tales themselves, many of them have been told to me
by natives, and all are more or less founded on fact. Some of the
incidents related have come under my personal observation, and for the
truth of these I can vouch. For the accuracy of the remaining stories
others are responsible, and I can only be held answerable for the
fra