s the stage in naive simulation of the specified number.
After the thieves have concealed themselves behind pasteboard
silhouettes of jars, Ali Baba's wife waddles on the stage bearing a
Standard Oil tin on her shoulder and with a dipper proceeds to ladle a
few drops of cocoanut oil on the head of each of the robbers. While she
is being introduced one of the thieves seizes the opportunity to take a
few whiffs from a cigarette, the smoke being plainly visible to the
audience. Another, wearying of his cramped position, incautiously shows
his head, whereupon Mrs. Ali Baba raps it sharply with her dipper,
eliciting from the actor an exclamation not in his lines. During the
intermissions the clown who accompanies the troupe convulses the
audience with side-splitting imitations of the pompous and frigid
Governor, who, as someone unkindly remarked, "must have been born in an
ice-chest," and of the bemoustached and bemonocled officer who commands
the constabulary, locally referred to as the Galloping Major. Compared
with the antics of these Malay comedians, the efforts of our own
professional laugh-makers seem dull and forced. Until you have seen
them you have never really laughed.

* * * * *

His Highness Haji Mohamed Jamalulhiram, Sultan of Sulu, was temporarily
sojourning in Sandakan when we were there, having come across from his
capital of Jolo for the purpose of collecting the monthly subsidy of
five hundred pesos paid him by the British North Borneo Company for
certain territorial concessions. The company would have sent the money
to Jolo, of course, but the Sultan preferred to come to Sandakan to
collect it; there are better facilities for gambling there.

Because I was curious to see the picturesque personage around whom
George Ade wrote his famous opera, _The Sultan of Sulu_, and because
the Lovely Lady and the Winsome Widow had read in a Sunday supplement
that he made it a practise to present those American women whom he met
with pearls of great price, upon our arrival at Sandakan I invited the
Sultan to dinner aboard the _Negros_. When I called on him at his hotel
to extend the invitation, I found him clad in a very soiled pink
kimono, a pair of red velvet slippers, and a smile made somewhat gory
by the betel-nut he had been chewing, but when he came aboard the
_Negros_ that evening he wore a red fez and irreproachable dinner
clothes of white linen. As the crew of the cutter was enti