the dogs in the kampong
began to bark, and the men rushed down their ladders screaming,
"Harimau! Harimau!" (A tiger! A tiger!) The next morning she found
that her pet dog, Fatima, named after herself, had been killed by one
stroke of the great beast's paw. Once a monster python swung from a
cocoanut tree through the window of her home, and wound itself round
and round the post of her mother's loom. It took a dozen men to tie
a rope to the serpent's tail, and pull it out.

Busuk went everywhere astride the punghulo's broad shoulders as he
collected the taxes and settled the disputes in the little village. She
went out into the straits in the big prau that floated the star and
crescent of Johore over its stern, to look at the fishing-stakes,
and was nearly wrecked by a great water-spout that burst within a
few feet of them.

Then she went twice to Johore, and gazed in open-eyed wonder at
the palaces of the Sultan and at the fort in which her uncle was
an officer.

"Some day," she thought, "I may see his Highness, and he may notice me
and smile." For had not his Highness spoken twice to her father and
called him a good man? So whenever she went to Johore she put on her
best sarong and kabaya> and in her jetty black hair she put the pin
her aunt had given her, with a spray of sweet-smelling chumpaka flower.

When she was four years old she went to the penager to learn to read
and write. In a few months she could outstrip any one in the class
in tracing Arabic characters on the sand-sprinkled floor, and she
knew whole chapters in the Koran.

So the days were passed in the little kampong under the gently swaying
cocoanuts, and the little Malayan girl grew up like her companions,
free and wild, with little thought beyond the morrow. That some day
she was to be married, she knew; for since her first birthday she had
been engaged to Mamat, the son of her father's friend, the punghulo
of Bander Bahru.

She had never seen Mamat, nor he her; for it was not proper that a
Malay should see his intended before marriage. She had heard that
he was strong and lithe of limb, and could beat all his fellows at
the game called ragga. When the wicker ball was in the air he never
let it touch the ground; for he was as quick with his head and feet,
shoulders, hips, and breast, as with his hands. He could swim and box,
and had once gone with his father to the seaports on New Year's Day
at Singapore, and his own prau had won the short