s it on his foot and plays in his turn. The ball must
never be touched with the hand; but the arm, shoulder, knee, or
thigh are used at pleasure to rest the foot. Two or three played very
skilfully, keeping the ball continually flying about, but the place was
too confined to show off the game to advantage. One evening a quarrel
arose from some dispute in the game, and there was a great row, and
it was feared there would be a fight about it--not two men only, but a
party of a dozen or twenty on each side, a regular battle with knives
and krisses; but after a large amount of talk it passed off quietly, and
we heard nothing about it afterwards.

Most Europeans being gifted by nature with a luxuriant growth of hair
upon their faces, think it disfigures them, and keep up a continual
struggle against her by mowing down every morning the crop which has
sprouted up flaring the preceding twenty-four hours. Now the men of
Mongolian race are, naturally, just as many of us want to he. They
mostly pass their lives with faces as smooth and beardless as an
infant's. But shaving seems an instinct of the human race; for many of
these people, having no hair to take off their faces, shave their heads.
Others, however, set resolutely to work to force nature to give them a
beard. One of the chief cock-fighters at Dobbo was a Javanese, a sort of
master of the ceremonies of the ring, who tied on the spars and acted as
backer-up to one of the combatants. This man had succeeded, by assiduous
cultivation, in raising a pair of moustaches which were a triumph of
art, for they each contained about a dozen hairs more than three inches
long, and which, being well greased and twisted, were distinctly visible
(when not too far off) as a black thread hanging down on each side of
his mouth. But the beard to match was the difficulty, for nature had
cruelly refused to give him a rudiment of hair on his chin, and the most
talented gardener could not do much if he had nothing to cultivate.
But true genius triumphs over difficulties. Although there was no hair
proper on the chin; there happened to be, rather on one side of it, a
small mole or freckle which contained (as such things frequently do) a
few stray hairs. These had been made the most of. They had reached four
or five inches in length, and formed another black thread dangling
from the left angle of the chin. The owner carried this as if it
were something remarkable (as it certainly was); he often felt