planks, others of bamboo. The former are always more or less
ornamented with carving and have high-pitched roofs and overhanging
eaves. The gable ends and all the chief posts and beams are sometimes
covered with exceedingly tasteful carved work, and this is still more
the case in the district of Menangkabo, further west. The floor is made
of split bamboo, and is rather shaky, and there is no sign of anything
we should call furniture. There are no benches or chairs or stools, but
merely the level floor covered with mats, on which the inmates sit or
lie. The aspect of the village itself is very neat, the ground being
often swept before the chief houses; but very bad odours abound, owing
to there being under every house a stinking mud-hole, formed by all
waste liquids and refuse matter, poured down through the floor above. In
most other things Malays are tolerably clean--in some scrupulously so;
and this peculiar and nasty custom, which is almost universal, arises,
I have little doubt, from their having been originally a maritime and
water-loving people, who built their houses on posts in the water, and
only migrated gradually inland, first up the rivers and streams, and
then into the dry interior. Habits which were at once so convenient and
so cleanly, and which had been so long practised as to become a portion
of the domestic life of the nation, were of course continued when the
first settlers built their houses inland; and without a regular system
of drainage, the arrangement of the villages is such that any other
system would be very inconvenient.

In all these Sumatran villages I found considerable difficulty in
getting anything to eat. It was not the season for vegetables, and when,
after much trouble, I managed to procure some yams of a curious variety,
I found them hard and scarcely eatable. Fowls were very scarce; and
fruit was reduced to one of the poorest kinds of banana. The natives
(during the wet season at least) live exclusively on rice, as the poorer
Irish do on potatoes. A pot of rice cooked very dry and eaten with salt
and red peppers, twice a day, forms their entire food during a large
part of the year. This is no sign of poverty, but is simply custom; for
their wives and children are loaded with silver armlets from wrist to
elbow, and carry dozens of silver coins strung round their necks or
suspended from their ears.

As I had moved away from Palembang, I had found the Malay spoken by
the common people