g that his Aunt Fatima had
woven for him on her loom.

Baboo had been well trained, and however lordly he might be in the
quarters, he was marked in his respect to the mistress. He would
touch his forehead to the red earth when I drove away of a morning to
the office; though the next moment I might catch him blowing a tiny
ball of clay from his sumpitan into the ear of his father, the syce,
as he stood majestically on the step behind me.

Baboo went to school for two hours every day to a fat old Arab
penager, or teacher, whose schoolroom was an open stall, and whose
only furniture a bench, on which he sat cross-legged, and flourished
a whip in one hand and a chapter of the Koran in the other.

There were a dozen little fellows in the school; all naked. They
stood up in line, and in a soft musical treble chanted in chorus the
glorious promises of the Koran, even while their eyes wandered from
the dusky corner where a cheko lizard was struggling with an atlas
moth, to the frantic gesticulations of a naked Hindu who was calling
his meek-eyed bullocks hard names because they insisted on lying down
in the middle of the road for their noonday siesta.

Baboo's father, Aboo Din, was a Hadji, for he had been to Mecca. When
nothing else could make Baboo forget the effects of the green durian
he had eaten, Aboo Din would take the child on his knees and sing
to him of his trip to Mecca, in a quaint, monotonous voice, full of
sorrowful quavers. Baboo believed he himself could have left Singapore
any day and found Mecca in the dark.

We had been living some weeks in a government bungalow, fourteen miles
from Singapore, across the island that looks out on the Straits of
Malacca. The fishing and hunting were excellent. I had shot wild pig,
deer, tapirs, and for some days had been getting ready to track down
a tiger that had been prowling in the jungle about the bungalow.

But of a morning, as we lay lazily chatting in our long chairs behind
the bamboo chicks, the cries of "Harimau! Harimau!" and "Baboo"
came up to us from the servants' quarters.

Aboo Din sprang over the railing of the veranda, and without stopping
even to touch the back of his hand to his forehead, cried,--

"Tuan Consul, tiger have eat chow dog and got Baboo!"

Then he rushed into the dining room, snatched up my Winchester and
cartridge-belt, and handed them to me with a "Lekas (quick)! Come!"

He sprang back off the veranda and ran to his quarters where t