ad a peculiarly drawn and shrunken
look, and the skin was stretched across his hollow cheeks like the
goat-hide on a drum-face. The White Man leaped down into the boat, and,
aided by the girl, he lifted the man on board. Then, painfully and very
slowly, the latter crept aft, going on all fours like some unclean
animal, until he had reached the shelter in the stern. The girl and the
White Man followed, and they all three squatted down on the creaking
bamboo decking. The man sat, all of a heap, moaning at short intervals,
as Malays moan when the fever holds them. The girl sat unconcernedly
preparing a quid of betel-nut from its four ingredients, and the White
Man inhaled his cigarette and waited for them to speak. He was trying to
get the hang of the business, and to guess what had caused two people,
whom he did not know, to seek an interview with him in this weird place,
at such an untimely hour.

The girl, the moonlight told him, was pretty. She had a small, perfectly
shaped head, a wide smooth forehead, neat, glossy hair, bright, laughing
eyes, with eyebrows arched and well-defined, 'like the artificial spur
of a fighting cock,' and the pretty little hands and feet which are so
common among all well-born Malay women. The man was hideous. His
shrunken and twitching face with its taut skin, and his utterly broken,
degraded, and decrepit appearance were indescribably horrible, and the
flickering of the moonlight, through the torn mat overhead, only added
to the grotesqueness of his figure.

At length the girl looked up at the White Man, and spoke:

'The _Tuan_ knows Awang Itam?' she asked. Yes, the White Man knew him
well, but had not seen him for some months.

'This is he,' she said, pointing to the abject figure by her side, and
her listener felt as though she had struck him across the face. When
last he had seen Awang Itam, he was one of the best favoured of the
King's Youths, a fine, upstanding youngster, dressed in many-coloured
silks, and with an amount of side and swagger about him, which would
have amply sufficed for a regiment of Her Majesty's Guards. Now he half
lay, half sat, on the damp decking, the most pitiful wreck of humanity
that the White Man had ever seen. What had befallen him to cause so
fearful a change? I will tell you the tale, in my own words, as the
White Man learned it from him and Bedah, as they sat talking during the
watches of that long night.

In every Independent Malay State, there is