standard
of Johore that floated so proudly above the palace, thankful for this
short peep into the heart of an Oriental court.

So the young Prince received the crown from the hands of his
father. To-day, the bones of that grand old statesman, the Sultan of
Johore, rest beside those of his royal fathers within the shadow of
the mosque.

In 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased the island on which
Singapore now stands from the father of the late Sultan of Johore,
the royal palace was a palm-thatched bungalow, the country an
unbroken jungle, and the inhabitants pirates and fishermen by turns;
the notorious Strait of Malacca was infested with long, keen, swift
pirate praus, and the snake-like kris menaced the merchant marine of
the world.

The advancement of the United States has not been more rapid since
that date than the advancement of Johore. The attap istana, or palace,
has given place to a series of palaces that rival those of many a much
better-known country; the jungle has given place to plantations of
gambier, tea, coffee, and pepper; the few elephant tracks and forest
paths, to a network of macadamized roads and projected railways;
and the native praus, to English-built barks and deeply laden cargo
steamers.

Two hundred thousand hard-working, money-making Chinese have been
added to the thirty-five thousand Malay aborigines, and the revenue
of this remnant of an empire is far greater than was the revenue of
the original state.

It remains to be seen whether the young Sultan will follow in the
footsteps of his father and preserve to Johore the distinction of
being, with the one exception of Siam, the only independent native
kingdom in southern Asia. One misstep and he will become but a
dependency of the great British Empire, a king only in name.

IN THE GOLDEN CHERSONESE

A Peep at the City of Singapore

Could an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by
a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New York and awakened
in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that
he would be sadly puzzled to even give the name of the continent on
which he had alighted.

Neither the buildings, the people, or the vehicles would aid him in
the least to decide.

Enclosing the four sides of the little banian-tree shaded park
in which he stands are rows of brick, white-faced, high-jointed
go-downs. Through their glassless windows great white punkahs swing
back a