Dear Thomas,-- ... You and Fanny talk of my coming back for a trifling
sore as if I was within an omnibus ride of Conduit St. I am now
perfectly well, and only waiting to go eastward. The far east is to me
what the far west is to the Americans. They both meet in California,
where I hope to arrive some day. I quite enjoy being a few days at
Singapore now. The scene is at once so familiar and strange. The
half-naked Chinese coolies, the neat shopkeepers, the clean, fat, old,
long-tailed merchants, all as busy and full of business as any
Londoners. Then the handsome Klings, who always ask double what they
take, and with whom it is most amusing to bargain. The crowd of boatmen
at the ferry, a dozer begging and disputing for a farthing fare, the
Americans, the Malays, and the Portuguese make up a scene doubly
interesting to me now that I know something about them and can talk to
them in the general language of the place. The streets of Singapore on a
fine day are as crowded and busy as Tottenham Court Road, and from the
variety of nations and occupations far more interesting. I am more
convinced than ever that no one can appreciate a new country in a short
visit. After two years in the country I only now begin to understand
Singapore and to marvel at the life and bustle, the varied occupations,
and strange population, on a spot which so short a time ago was an
uninhabited jungle....--Yours affectionately,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

* * * * *

TO HIS SISTER, MRS. SIMS

_Singapore. April 21, 1856._

My dear Fanny,--I believe I wrote to you last mail, and have now little
to say except that I am still a prisoner in Singapore and unable to get
away to my land of promise, Macassar, with whose celebrated oil you are
doubtless acquainted. I have been spending three weeks with my old
friend the French missionary, going daily into the jungle, and fasting
on Fridays on omelet and vegetables, a most wholesome custom which I
think the Protestants were wrong to leave off. I have been reading Huc's
travels in China in French, and talking with a French missionary just
arrived from Tonquin. I have thus obtained a great deal of information
about these countries and about the extent of the Catholic missions in
them, which is astonishing. How is it that they do their work so much
more thoroughly than the Protestant missionaries? In Cochin China,
Tonquin, and China, where all Christian missionaries are obliged t