BRITISH LION.

"How the world is made for each of us,
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment's product--thus
When a soul declares itself--to wit
By its fruit, the thing it does."

"I assure you, Sir, weather as hot as this has not been felt in Singapur
for years and years. March is always reckoned our hottest month, but
this is quite abnormal."

And I made answer to the stranger wearily:--

"Yes, of course. They always told that lie in the other places. Leave me
alone and let me drip."

This is the heat of an orchid-house,--a clinging, remorseless,
steam-sweat that knows no variation between night and day. Singapur is
another Calcutta, but much more so. In the suburbs they are building
rows of cheap houses; in the city they run over you and jostle you into
the kennel. These are unfailing signs of commercial prosperity. India
ended so long ago that I cannot even talk about the natives of the
place. They are all Chinese, except where they are French or Dutch or
German. England is by the uninformed supposed to own the island. The
rest belongs to China and the Continent, but chiefly China. I knew I had
touched the borders of the Celestial Empire when I was thoroughly
impregnated with the reek of Chinese tobacco, a fine-cut, greasy, glossy
weed, to whose smoke the aroma of a huqa in the cookhouse is all
Rimmell's shop.

Providence conducted me along a beach, in full view of five miles of
shipping,--five solid miles of masts and funnels,--to a place called
Raffles Hotel, where the food is as excellent as the rooms are bad. Let
the traveller take note. Feed at Raffles and sleep at the Hotel de
l'Europe. I would have done this but for the apparition of two large
ladies tastefully attired in bedgowns, who sat with their feet propped
on a chair. This Joseph ran; but it turned out that they were Dutch
ladies from Batavia, and that that was their national costume till
dinner time.

"If, as you say, they had on stockings and dressing-gowns, you have
nothing to complain of. They generally wear nothing but a night-gown
till five o'clock," quoth a man versed in the habits of the land.

I do not know whether he spoke the truth; I am inclined to think that he
did; but now I know what "Batavian grace" really means, I don't approve
of it. A lady in a dressing-gown disturbs the mind and prevents careful
consideration of the political outlook in Singapur, which is now
supplied with a set of