, without a soul being made aware of their intended
departure. They had neither stayed to reap their crops, which now stood
ripening in the fields; to sell their house and compound, which had been
bought with good money,--'dollars of the whitest,' as the Malay phrase
has it,--nor yet to collect their debts. This is a fact; and to one who
knows the passion for wealth and for property, which is to be found in
the breast of every Sumatran Malay, it is perhaps the strangest
circumstance of all the weird events, which go to make up the drama of
the Were-Tiger of Slim.

There is, to the European mind, only one possible explanation. Haji Ali
and his sons had been the victims of foul play. They had been killed by
the simple villagers of Slim, and a cock-and-bull story trumped up to
account for their disappearance. This is a very good, and withal a very
astute explanation, showing as it does a profound knowledge of human
nature, and I should be more than half inclined to accept it as the
correct one, but for the fact that Haji Ali and his sons turned up in
quite another part of the Peninsula some months later. They have nothing
out of the way about them to mark them from their fellows, except that
Haji Ali goes lame on his right leg.

THE AMOK OF DATO KAYA BIJI DERJA

I have done for ever with all these things,
--Deeds that were joyous to knights and kings,
In the days that with song were cherish'd.
The songs are ended, the deeds are done,
There's none shall gladden me now, not one,
There is nothing good for me under the sun,
But to perish as these things perish'd.

_The Rhyme of the Joyous Garde._

The average stay-at-home Englishman knows very little about the Malay,
and cares less. Any fragmentary ideas that he may have concerning him
are, for the most part, vague and hopelessly wrong. When he thinks of
him at all, which is not often, he conjures up the figure of a
wild-eyed, long-haired, blood-smeared, howling and naked savage, armed
with what Tennyson calls the 'cursed Malayan crease,' who spends all his
spare time running _amok_. As a matter of fact, _amok_ are not as common
as people suppose, but false ideas on the subject, and more especially
concerning the reasons which lead a Malay to run _amok_, are not
confined to those Europeans who know nothing about the natives of the
Peninsula. White men, in the East and out of it, are apt to attribute
_amok_ runn