falling to her knees and fastened down the front to the
silver girdle with golden brooches. Her toes would have been covered
with sandals cunningly embroidered in colored beads and gold tinsel.

Wahpering, too, might have added to his sarong a thin vest, buttoned
close up to the neck, a light dimity baju, or jacket, and a pair of
loose silk drawers. They made no apology for their appearance, but
did the honors of the house with a native grace, regaling us with
the cool, fresh milk of the cocoanut, and the delicious globes of
the mangosteens.

The glare of the noonday sun, here on the equator, is inconceivable. It
beats down in bald, irregular waves of heat that seem to stifle
every living being and to burn the foliage to a cinder. Even the
sharp, insistent whir of the cicada ceases when the thermometer on
the sunny side of our palm-thatched bungalow reaches 155 deg.. If I am
forced to go outside, I don my cork helmet, and hold a paper umbrella
above it. Even then, after I have gone a half-hour, I feel dizzy and
sick. I pass native after native, whose only head covering, if they
have any at all save their short-cut black hair, is a handkerchief,
stiffened, and tied with a peculiar twist on the head, or a rimless
cap with possibly a text of the Koran embroidered on its front. It is
only when they are on the sea from early morning to sunset, that they
think it worth while to protect their heads with an umbrella-shaped,
cane-worked head frame like those worn by the natives of Siam and
China. The women I meet simply draw their sarongs more closely about
their heads as the sun ascends higher and higher into the heavens, and
go clattering off down the road in their wooden pattens, unconscious
of my envy or wonderment.

The sarong is more to the Malay than is the kilt to the Scotchman. It
is his dress by day and his covering at night. He uses it as a sail
when far out from land in his cockle-shell boat, or as a bag in which
to carry his provisions when following an elephant path through the
dense jungle.

The checks, in its design, although indistinguishable to the European,
differ according to his tribe or clan, and serve him as a means of
identification wherever he may be on the peninsula.

The sarong and kris are distinctly and solely Malayan; they are shared
with no other country; they are to be placed side by side with the
green turban of the Moslem pilgrim and the cimeter of the Prophet.

A history of one, like the