Jahore;
also a large and handsome mosque. Here is also a wide-open gambling
establishment where hundreds of Chinese may be seen playing "fantan."

On the return from Jahore, if interested in such things, a visit to a
rubber estate may be made, and the whole process in the manufacture of
rubber may be seen in a few hours; it is a strange and fascinating
process and is, perhaps, the most important industry of the Federated
Malay States.

It is interesting to compare Singapore which has been a British colony
for nearly a century with Manila, a city of about the same size, that
has been under American rule for less than two decades. The results that
have been accomplished in the latter place along the lines of
sanitation, education, and other civilizing influences should make an
American proud of his native land.

VI. HOW RUBBER IS MADE.

One of the principal products of the Malay Peninsula is rubber. Like
most people who have never happened to investigate the matter my ideas
as to the way in which an automobile tire is extracted from a tree were
very hazy; so, with another American, who had charge of a mission
school in Singapore, I boarded the Jahore express on the F. M. S. R. R.
(F. M. S. meaning Federated Malay States) and after a run of half an
hour arrived at the Bukit Timar rubber estate some ten miles northwest
of Singapore.

The Bukit Timar is an up-to-date plantation of more than one hundred
thousand trees, and here we saw the whole process, from tree to sheet
rubber, as shipped to all parts of the world and sold by the pound.
Rubber trees grow to a considerable size, but this being a young
plantation most of the trees were not over six or eight inches in
diameter. In the middle of the estate was a very attractive bungalow
where lived the manager and his wife, a young English couple, and the
former very courteously showed us about his place and explained the
different processes.

"Tapping" begins at daybreak, and all the juice or _latex_ is collected
before noon. Dozens of native and Chinese men and boys are employed in
this process, some of the latter being so small that they can scarcely
carry the two buckets of latex on the bamboo stick over the shoulder.

In tapping, a very thin and narrow piece of bark is gouged off, just
deep enough to make the tree bleed, but not deep enough to kill it; so
that by the time the bark on one side of the tree has been cut away that
on the opposite side has had