ered birds
are found in their native atmosphere. There are plenty of Chinese at
Singapore. They dominate the Strait settlements, monopolizing all
branches of small trade, while the natives are lazy and listless, true
children of the equatorial regions. Is it because Nature is here so
bountiful, so lovely, so prolific, that her children are sluggish,
dirty, and heedless? It would seem to require a less propitious climate,
a sterile soil, and rude surroundings to awaken human energy and to
place man at his best. The common people are seen almost naked, and
those who wear clothes at all, affect the brightest colors. The jungle
is dense, tigers abound, and men, women, and children are almost daily
killed and eaten by them.

It is easy to divine the merchantable products of the island from the
nature of the articles which are seen piled up for shipment upon the
wharves, consisting of tapioca, cocoanut oil, gambia, tin ore, indigo,
tiger-skins, coral, gutta-percha, hides, gums, and camphor.

There is no winter or autumn here, no sere and yellow leaf period, but
seemingly a perpetual spring, with a temperature almost unvarying; new
leaves always swelling from the bud, flowers always in bloom, the sun
rising and setting within five minutes of six o'clock during the entire
year. Singapore enjoys a soft breeze most of the day from across the Bay
of Bengal, laden with fragrant sweetness from the spice-fields of
Ceylon.

Each place we visit has its peculiar local pictures. Here, small
hump-backed oxen are seen driven about at a lively trot in place of
horses. Pedlers roam the streets selling drinking-water, with soup,
fruit, and a jelly made from sugar and sea-weed, called agar-agar.
Native houses are built upon stilts to keep out the snakes and tigers.
The better class of people wear scarlet turbans and white cotton skirts;
others have parti-colored shawls round their heads, while yellow scarfs
confine a cotton wrap about the waist. Diminutive horses drag heavy
loads, though themselves scarcely bigger than large dogs. Itinerant
cooks, wearing a wooden yoke about their necks, with a cooking apparatus
on one end, and a little table to balance it on the other, serve meals
of fish and rice upon the streets to laborers and boatmen, for a couple
of pennies each. Money has here, as in most Eastern countries, a larger
purchasing power than it has with us in the West. The variety of fruit
is greater than in China or Japan, and there are