d," at any rate, I fear Borneo can never be a refuge,
as the sun would there be more fatal than the deadly cold here, and the
race could not be kept up without visits to colder climates. But if
sago and bananas are so plentiful and so nourishing, as we are taught
by the experts, it does seem somewhat remarkable, in this age of
invention, that some means cannot be devised of bringing together the
prolific food stores of the East and the starving thousands of the
West.

Both before, during and after the day's work, the Malays, man and woman,
boy and girl, solace and refresh themselves with tobacco and with the
areca-nut, or the _betel_ nut as, for some unexplained reason, it is
called in English books, though _betel_ is the name of the pepper leaf
in which the areca-nut is wrapped and with which it is masticated.

A good deal of the tobacco now used in Brunai is imported from Java or
Palembang (Sumatra), but a considerable portion is grown in the hilly
districts on the West Coast of North Borneo, in the vicinity of Gaya
Bay, by the Muruts. It is unfermented and sun-dried, but has not at all
a bad flavour and is sometimes used by European pipe smokers. The
Brunai Malays and the natives generally, as a rule, smoke the tobacco in
the form of cigarettes, the place of paper being taken by the fine inner
leaf of the _nipa_ palm, properly prepared by drying. The Court
cigarettes are monstrous things, fully eight inches long sometimes, and
deftly fashioned by the fingers of the ladies of the harem.

Some of the inland natives, who are unable to procure _nipa_ leaf
(_dahun kirei_), use roughly made wooden pipes, and the leaf of the
maize plant is also occasionally substituted for the _nipa_. It is a
common practice with persons of both sexes to insert a "quid" of tobacco
in their cheek, or between the upper lip and the gum. This latter
practice does not add to the appearance of a race not overburdened with
facial charms. The tobacco is allowed to remain in position for a long
time, but it is not chewed. The custom of areca-nut chewing has been so
often described that I will only remind the reader that the nut is the
produce of a graceful and slender palm, which flourishes under
cultivation in all Malayan countries and is called by Malays _pinang_.
It is of about the size of a nutmeg and, for chewing, is cut into pieces
of convenient size and made into a neat little packet with the green
leaf of the aromatic betel pepper plant, a