ic man all the world
over, these individuals are popularly supposed to be invariably amusing,
and a loud guffaw goes up whenever they open their mouths, no matter
what the words that issue from them. Most of his hearers had heard his
threadbare old jokes any time these twenty years, but the ready laughter
greeted each of them in turn, as though they were newly born into the
world. A Malay does not understand that a joke may pall from repetition,
and is otherwise liable to be driven into the ground. He will ask for
the same story, or the same jest time after time; prefers that it should
be told in the same manner, and in the same words; and will laugh in the
same place, with equal zest, at each repetition, just as do little
children among ourselves. A similar failure to appreciate the eternal
fitness of things, causes a Malay _Raja_, when civilised, to hang seven
copies of the same unlovely photograph around the walls of his
sitting-room.

Meanwhile, the women-folk had come from far and near, to help to prepare
the feast, and the men, having previously done the heavy work of
carrying the water, hewing the firewood, jointing the meat, and crushing
the curry stuff, they were all busily engaged in the back premises of
the house, cooking as only Malay women can cook, and keeping up a
constant babble of shrill trebles, varied by an occasional excited
scream of direction from one of the more senior women among them. The
younger and prettier girls had carried their work to the door of the
house, and thence were engaging at long range in the game of 'eye
play,'--as the Malays call it,--with the youths of the village, little
heeding the havoc they were making in susceptible male breasts, whose
wounds, however, they would be ready enough to heal, as occasion
offered, with a limitless generosity.

The bride, of course, having being dressed in her best, and loaded with
gold ornaments, borrowed from many miles around, which had served to
deck every bride in the district ever since any one could remember, was
left seated on the _geta_, or raised sleeping platform, in the dimly
lighted inner apartments, there to await the ordeal known to Malay
cruelty as _sanding_. The ceremony that bears this name, is the one at
which the bride and bridegroom are brought together for the first time.
They are officially supposed never to have seen one another before,
though no Malay who respects himself ever allows his _fiancee_ to be
finally selecte