hristian now, I suppose?" I remarked.

"To hell with Clistianity," he retorted. "Me go to school to learn
English."

* * * * *

The chartered company maintains no public health service, nor, so far
as I was able to discover, has it adopted the most rudimentary sanitary
or quarantine precautions. It is, indeed, so notoriously lax in this
respect that when we touched at ports in Dutch Borneo, the Celebes, and
Java, the mere fact that we had come from British North Borneo caused
the health officers to view us with grave suspicion. When we were in
Sandakan the town was undergoing a periodic visitation of that
deadliest and most terrifying of all Oriental diseases, bubonic plague.
As it is transmitted by the fleas on plague-infested rats, we took the
precaution, when we went ashore, of wearing boots and breeches or of
tying the bottoms of our trousers about our ankles with string, so as
to prevent the fleas from biting us. It being necessary to go alongside
the coal-wharves in order to replenish the bunkers of the _Negros_,
orders were given that rat-guards--circular pieces of tin about the
size of a barrel-top--should be fixed to our hawsers, thus making it
difficult, if not impossible, for rats to invade the ship by that
route, while sailors armed with clubs were posted along the landward
rail to despatch any rodents that might succeed in gaining the deck. As
the native and Chinese laborers had fled in terror from the wharves,
where the dreaded disease had first manifested itself through the
deaths of several stevedores, the authorities offered their freedom to
those prisoners in the local jail who would volunteer for the hazardous
work of cleaning up the wharves and warehouses and sprinkling them with
petroleum. Six prisoners volunteered, but they might better have served
out their terms, for the next day four of them were dead. Though the
stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy
complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of
Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were
exposed. But life in a land like Borneo breeds fatalism. As an
official remarked, with a shrug of his shoulders, "After you have spent
a few years out here you don't much care how you die, or how soon.
Plague is as convenient a way of going out as any other."

* * * * *

The greatest obstacle to the successful development