I was aiding to remove from the face of the earth, and
to lay in his quiet resting-place, the last Pirate on the East Coast.

THE STORY OF BAYAN THE PAROQUET

Said one among them, 'Surely not in vain
My substance from the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'

_Omar Khayya'm._

Life--meaning the life which animates the bodies of other people--is not
priced high by the natives of the East Coast; but eight or nine years
ago, it was held even more lightly than it is at present. Murder was
frequently done for the most trivial causes, and a Malay often drew a
knife, when an Englishman would have been content to drop a damn. Young
Chiefs were wont to take a life or two from pure _galete de coeur_,
merely to show that they were beginning to feel their feet, and were
growing up brave and manly as befitted their descent. Such doings were
not regarded altogether with disfavour by the boy's parents,--for, in a
rude state of society, a Chief must be feared before he is loved, if his
days are to be long in the land,--and some of the older men encouraged
their sons to make a kill, much in the same spirit which animated
parents in Europe half a century ago, when they put a finishing touch to
the education of their children by sending them on the Grand Tour. Some
fathers went even further than this, and Raja Haji Hamid once told me
that he killed his first man when he was a child of eleven or twelve,
his victim being a very thin, miserable-looking Chinaman, upon whom his
father bade him try his 'prentice hand. The Chinaman had done no evil,
but he was selected because he was feeble and decrepit, and would show
no fight even if attacked by a small boy with a _kris_. Raja Haji told
me that he botched the killing a good deal, but that he hacked the life
out of the Chinaman at last, though the poor wretch, like Charles II.,
took an unconscionable time adying. Death to this Chinaman must have
only been one degree less unpleasant than it was to the man who

beyond the seas
Was scraped to death with oyster shells
Among the Carrabees.

The story of Bayan the Paroquet, which I am about to tell, is another
rather striking instance of the utter impunity with which the son of a
Chief may take life, under the rule of a Native Prince in an Independent
Malay State.

I first