ouragement. But, when he has got thus far,
discouragement matters little, for he has become bitten with the love of
his discoveries, and he can no more quit them than the dipsomaniac can
abandon the drams which are killing him.

Then he gets deep into a groove and is happy. His fingers are between
the leaves of the Book of Human Nature, and his eager eyes are scanning
the lines of the chapter which in time he hopes to make his own. The
advent of another white man is a weariness of the flesh. The natives
about him have learned to look upon him as one of their own people. His
speech is their speech, he can think as they do, can feel as they feel,
rejoice in their joys, and sorrow in their pains. He can tell them
wonderful things, and a philosophy of which they had not dreamed. He
never offends their susceptibilities, never wounds their self-respect,
never sins against their numerous conventionalities. He has feasted with
them at their weddings, doctored their pains, healed their sick,
protected them from oppression, stood their friend in time of need, done
them a thousand kindnesses, and has helped their dying through the
strait and awful pass of death. Above all, he _understands_, and, in a
manner, they love him. A new white man, speaking to him in an unknown
tongue, seems to lift him for the time out of their lives. The stranger
jars on the natives, who are the exile's people, and he, looking through
the native eyes which are no longer strange to him, sees where his
race-mate offends, and in his turn is jarred, until he begins to hate
his own countrymen. Coming out of the groove hurts badly, and going back
into it is almost worse, but when a man is once well set in the rut of
native life, these do not disturb him, for he is happy, and has no need
of other and higher things. This is the exile's Heaven.

As years go on the up-country life of which I write will become less and
less common in this Peninsula of ours, and the Malays will be governed
wholly by men, who, never having lived their lives, cannot expect to
have more than a surface knowledge of the people whose destinies are in
their hands. The Native States will, I fancy, be none the better
governed, and those who rule them will miss much which has tended to
widen the lives of the men who came before them, and who dwelt among
the people while they were still as God made them.

And those who led these lives? The years will dim the memories of all
they once learned