e women wait upon themselves, and have none to
attend to their wants, or forestall their wishes, they very soon acquire
an extremely good notion of how to look after themselves; and, since
they have never known a state of society in which women are treated as
they are amongst ourselves, they do not repine, and seem, for the most
part, to be sufficiently bright, light-hearted, and happy.

The men, meanwhile, had each rolled up a quid of betel-nut, taking the
four ingredients carefully from the little brass boxes in the wooden
tray before them, and having prepared cigarettes of Javenese tobacco,
with the dried shoots of the _nipah_ palm for wrappers, had at length
broken the absorbed silence, which had held them fast while the matter
of the meal was occupying their undivided attention.

The talk flitted lightly over many subjects; for a hearty meal, and the
peace of soul which repletion brings with it, are not conducive to
concentration of attention, nor yet to activity of mind. The Malay, too,
is always superficial, and talk among natives generally plays round
facts, rather than round ideas. Che' Seman, the owner of the house, and
his two sons, Awang and Ngah, discussed the prospects of the crop then
growing in the fields behind the compound. Their cousin Abdollah, who
chanced to be passing the night in the house, told of a fall which his
wife's aunt's brother had come by, when climbing a cocoa-nut tree. Mat,
his _biras_ (for they had married two sisters, which established a
definite form of relationship between them, according to Malay ideas),
added a few more or less ugly details to Abdollah's description of the
corpse after the accident. And as this attracted the attention of the
two remaining men, Potek and Kassim, who had been discussing the price
of rice, and the varying chances of _getah_ hunting, the talk at this
point became general. Potek and Kassim had recently returned from
Dungun, where, as has been said, the present Sultan of Pahang was, at
that time, collecting the force with which he afterwards successfully
invaded and conquered the State. They told of all they had seen and
heard, multiplying their figures with the daring recklessness that is
born of unfettered imaginations, and the lack of a rudimentary knowledge
of arithmetic. But even this absorbing topic could not hold the
attention of their hearers for long. Before Potek and Kassim had well
finished the enumeration of the heavy artillery, of the thou