keep the State going at both ends, creating its prosperity by their labour, and returning a considerable portion of their earnings in the form of taxation.

Jahore is rich in woods, which cover its hills and dales, but the cost of transport is so great that this, which would be a source of wealth elsewhere, is here an embarrassment. The experiment on which the Chinese is just now fixing his shrewd small eyes is that of coffee-planting. The climate and the soil of Jahore have always seemed peculiarly well adapted for the cultivation of coffee. Some years ago a few hundred acres were sown, but the wrong plant was selected, and failure followed, temporarily shutting off experiments of a similar kind. Three years ago, about a thousand acres were planted with another kind of berry, which is looking exceedingly hopeful. It takes four years before a new coffee plantation bears fruit. Next year is the crucial one, and should the experiment turn out as well as it just now promises, Jahore will become an important place.

Singapore presents strange contrasts of English and tropical life, being an English town just as much as Eastbourne or Brighton, though set within eighty miles of the Equator. Its streets are named in English fashion, with

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the familiar white letters on blue enamel. "High Street" and "Stamford Road" are the kind of names written up, and at the corners of the road are homely cabalistic signs, "F.P. 40 ft.," indicating the whereabouts of the water-pipe. The policemen wear a modification of their British brethren's uniform, one detail being that it is apparently optional with them to wear stockings. Some do and some do not. A pretty sharp contrast passed me in High Street. A tricycle came along, and on it was seated a grave and reverend signor, in yellow turban, white jacket, red shirt, a paper umbrella, and bare brown legs.

In spite of tricycles, High Streets, waterpipes, lamp-posts, and police in uniform, Singapore is intensely tropical. The atmosphere is something that one never looks through elsewhere. The figures that throng its sunny streets are all tropical. Europeans dress in white duck suits with straw hats and umbrellas. The native men dress in as little as possible. The Chinese come out in cool costumes of white, or of that rich blue, the making of which and transference to calico stuffs seems to be one of their secrets. In addition, there are many emigrants from India in their varied costumes. Madras sends a

considerable contingent, the women strikingly handsome and graceful.

Western civilization and Eastern habits of dress come again in sharp contrast in the matter of billycock hats. I have often wondered what became of this widely used head-gear when it grew too shabby to wear. The secret is an open one for any who come across the Chinese labouring out of their own country: The old hats are collected in England and forwarded in bales to wherever the Chinese most do congregate.

I noticed the incongruity among the Chinese who crowded the Coptic in the voyage across the Pacific. It is much more striking here. That a Chinaman on board ship should cover his shaven pate with an old billycock hat stained with hair-grease, buffeted by English winds, and soaked in London fog, looks funny, but is not inexplicable. Anything will do on board ship. To see him here on land dressed all in his best, his spotless white gown and blue trousers, his face shining with soap and worldly prosperity, his pigtail neatly disposed down his back, and on his head a greasy battered billycock, is passing strange. It cannot be simply the form and material that recommend the hat, otherwise they would have them new. I never saw a Chinaman-I won't say with a

new hat on, but—with anything less than one of disreputable old age. I fancy that with the Chinese the ruling passion is strong alike in the matter of eggs and hats. They like them both old.

The jinrikisha is seen at Singapore, but, as at Hongkong, though for a different reason, it does not flourish. It is absolutely too hot for a man, however lightly clad, to run about dragging weights, and the few jinrikishas one meets do not get much beyond walking pace. At Penang the triumphant westward march of the jinrikisha is finally arrested. Both at Singapore and Penang a conveyance called a gharry is in popular use. It is a large black, funereal structure something like a pauper's hearse. It is drawn by a small but masterful and well-made pony, a couple of which would very comfortably stow themselves in the gharry. The Hongkong ponies-splendid little creatures, but apt to wax wroth and kick-are much prized at Singapore. We brought one down for the Maharajah's brother. His Highness was on the wharf with umbrella up awaiting the arrival of his new acquisition.

"He's all right; we have got him here," the friend who had brought him shouted over the bulwarks.

"Is he," asked the prince, with anxious face and bated breath, "is he quiet?"

Being assured on this point, the prince, a portly personage in white ducks, heaved a sigh of satisfaction and turned away.

The traction of heavier goods is accomplished in carts drawn by a yoke of oxen. There is, nevertheless, plenty of work for porters, who under the noonday sun carry stupendous burdens by bamboos borne upon their shoulders. They scorn the interposition of a pad between their bare flesh and the hard bamboo. Accustomed from earliest boyhood to carry weights in this way, the skin and muscle of their shoulders have so hardened as to become insensible to what to an English porter would be pain unbearable for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

It is a long drive from the wharf to the hotel, which is situated in the centre of the town. The highway is bordered with tropical vegetation-palms, cocoa-nut trees, bananas, now fully bearing, and flowers, familiar in English hothouses, here growing by the wayside in wild luxuriance. In the early morning, when life is well worth living in the tropics, we took a drive to the Botanic Gardens at Singapore, which are beautifully kept, and full of choicest tropical plants and trees growing in