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Title: In Court and Kampong
Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula

Author: Hugh Clifford

Release Date: January 7, 2009 [EBook #27728]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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IN COURT AND KAMPONG

IN
COURT & KAMPONG

BEING
TALES & SKETCHES OF NATIVE LIFE
IN THE MALAY PENINSULA

BY
HUGH CLIFFORD

LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS
48 LEICESTER SQUARE

_First printed April 1897_
_Reprinted September 1903_

To My Wife

My knowledge of all these things was won
Ere to gladden my life You came,
But the Land I knew, the Deeds saw done
Will be never again the same,
For You have come, like the rising Sun,
To golden my World with your flame.

H. C.

PREFACE

The nineteen tales and sketches, which are enclosed within the covers of
this Book, relate to certain brown men and obscure things in a distant
and very little known corner of the Earth. The Malay Peninsula--that
slender tongue of land which projects into the tepid seas at the extreme
south of the Asiatic Continent--is but little more than a name to most
dwellers in Europe. But, even in the Peninsula itself, and to the
majority of those white men whose whole lives have been passed in the
Straits of Malacca, the East Coast and the remote interior, of which I
chiefly write, are almost as completely unknown.

It has been my endeavour, in writing this book, to give some idea of the
lives lived in these lands by Europeans whose lot has led them away from
the beaten track; by the aboriginal tribes of _Sakai_ and _Semang_; but,
above all, by those Malays who, being yet untouched by contact with
white men, are still in a state of original sin. My stories deal with
natives of all classes; dwellers in the Courts of Kings; peasants in
their _kampongs_, or villages, by the riv