their best to live up to their traditions. Below the rapids the
natives are chiefly noted for the quaint pottery that they produce from
the clay which abounds there, and the rude shapes and ruder tracery of
their vessels have probably suffered no change since the days when
Solomon's fleets sought gold and peafowl and monkeys in the jungles of
the Peninsula, as everybody knows. Above the rapids the Malays plant
enough _gambir_ to supply the wants of the whole betel-chewing
population of Pahang, and, as the sale of this commodity wins them a few
dollars annually, they are too indolent to plant their own rice. This
grain, which is the staple of all Malays, without which they cannot
live, is therefore sold to them by down river natives, at the exorbitant
price of half a dollar the bushel.

A short distance up stream, and midway between the mouth and the big
rapids, there is a straggling village, called Ranggul, the houses of
which, made of wattled bamboos and thatched with palm leaves, stand on
piles, amid the groves of cocoa-nut and areca-nut palms, varied by
clumps of smooth-leaved banana trees. The houses are not very close
together, but a man can call from one to the other with ease; and thus
the cocoa-nuts thrive, which, as the Malays say, grow not with pleasure
beyond the sound of the human voice. The people of the village are not
more indolent than other Malays. They plant a little rice, when the
season comes, in the swamps behind the village. They work a little
jungle produce, when the pinch of poverty drives them to it, but, like
all Malays, they take life sufficiently easily. If you chance to go into
the village of Ranggul, during any of the hot hours of the day, you will
find most of its occupants lying about in their dark, cool houses,
engaged upon such gentle mental tasks as may be afforded by whittling a
stick, or hacking slowly at the already deeply scored threshold-block,
with their clumsy wood-knives. Sitting thus, they gossip with a passing
neighbour, who stops to chatter as he sits propped upon the stair
ladder, or they croak snatches of song, with some old-world refrain to
it, and, from time to time, break off to cast a word over their
shoulders to the wife in the dim background near the fireplace, or to
the little virgin daughter, carefully secreted on the shelf overhead, in
company with a miscellaneous collection of dusty, grimy rubbish, the
disused lumber of years. Nature has been very lavish to the M