ties. Nature, as we see her in the
material things which delight our eyes, is straight from the hand of
God, unmarred by man's deforming, a marvellous creation of green growths
and brilliant shades of colour, fresh, sweet, pure, an endless panorama
of loveliness. But it is not only the material things which form the
chief beauties of the land in which we dwell. The ever-varying lights of
the Peninsula, and the splendid Malayan sky that arches over us are, in
themselves, at once the crown of our glory, and the imparters of a fresh
and changeful loveliness to the splendours of the earth. Our eyes are
ever glutted with the wonders of the sky, and of the lights which are
shed around us. From the moment when the dawn begins to paint its orange
tints in the dim East, and later floods the vastness of the low-lying
clouds with glorious dyes of purple and vermillion, and a hundred shades
of colour, for which we have no name, reaching to the very summit of the
heavens; on through the early morning hours, when the slanting rays of
the sun throw long broad streaks of dazzlingly white light upon the
waters of sea and river; on through the burning noonday, when the
shadows fall black and sharp and circular, in dwarfed patches about our
feet; on through the cooler hours of the afternoon, when the sun is a
burning disc low down in the western sky, or, hiding behind a bank of
clouds, throws wide-stretched arms of prismatic colour high up into the
heavens; on through the hour of sunset, when all the world is a flaming
blaze of gold and crimson; and so into the cool still night, when the
moon floods us with a sea of light only one degree less dazzling than
that of day, or when the thousand wonders of the southern stars gaze
fixedly upon us from their places in the deep clear vault above our
heads, and Venus casts a shadow on the grass; from dawn to dewy eve,
from dewy eve to dawn, the lights of the Peninsula vary as we watch them
steep us and all the world in glory, and half intoxicate us with their
beauty.

But the sea is the best point or vantage from which to watch the glories
of which I tell--speaking as I do in weak colourless words of sights and
scenes which no human brush could ever hope to render, nor mortal poet
dream of painting in immortal song--and if you would see them for
yourself, and drink in their beauty to the full, go dwell among the
Fisher Folk of the East Coast.

They are a rough, hard-bit gang, ignorant and supersti