to side, with the motion of the boat, as though he still was musing
sadly on the schemes which had brought him to his bloody death.

'ONE MORE UNFORTUNATE'

For the gods very subtly fashion
Madness with sadness upon earth:
Not knowing in any wise compassion,
Nor holding pity of any worth.

_Atalanta in Calydon._

In writing of the _amok_, which Dato' Kaya Biji Derja ran in the streets
of Kuala Trengganu, I have spoken of suicide as being of very rare
occurrence among Malays of either sex, and, indeed, I know of no
authenticated case in which a man of these people has taken his life
with his own hand. A Chinaman, who has had a difference of opinion with
a friend, or who conceives that he has been ill-treated by the Powers
that be, betakes himself to his dwelling, and there deliberately hangs
himself with his pig-tail, dying happy in the pleasing belief that his
spirit will haunt those who have done him a wrong, and render the
remainder of their lives upon earth 'one demned horrid grind.' Not so
the Malay. He, being gifted with the merest rudiments of an imagination,
prefers to take practical vengeance on his kind by means of a knife, to
trusting to such supernatural retaliation as may be effected after death
by his ghost.

This story deals with a suicide which occurred in Pahang in July 1893,
and I have selected it to tell, because the circumstances were
remarkable, and are quite unprecedented in my experience.

If you go up the Pahang River for a hundred and eighty miles, you come
to a spot where the stream divides into two main branches, and where the
name Pahang dies an ignominious death in a small ditch, which debouches
at their point of junction. The right stream,--using the term in its
topographical sense,--is the Jelai, and the left is the Tembeling. If
you go up the latter, you come to rapids innumerable, a few _gambir_
plantations, and a great many of the best ruffians in the Peninsula, who
are also my very good friends. If you follow the Jelai up past Kuala
Lipis, where the river of the latter name falls into it on its right
bank, and on, and on, and on, you come to the Sakai country, where the
Malay language is still unknown, and where the horizon of the people is
formed by the impenetrable jungle that shuts down on the other side of a
slender stream, and is further narrowed by the limitations of an
intellect which cannot conceive an arithmetical idea high