It was Mr. Wise the District Officer who had received me so politely a few hours before.
He was on his return from a survey made in order to define the boundary of some land belonging to two Malays. Without donning any sort of uniform or insignia, this British delegate had known how to preserve all the solemnity and dignity of form due to the occasion, a virtue peculiar to the English who are always and everywhere the most rigorous observers of social and official etiquette.
Mr. Wise kindly invited me to follow him the Club where he kept me in friendly conservation, answering all the questions I could not refrain from asking him in my desire to become better acquainted with the colony and its method of government.
Now Mr. Wise is no more, but in him his country lost a model functionary for intelligence, solicitude and uprightness.
He died at the very moment his future seemed to smile its brightest; when his fondest hopes were about to be crowned by matrimony with the young lady of his choice.
Let me, through these pages, render to his memory the modest, affectionate homage of admiration and deferential friendship.
That day, having made my peace with the authorities, I returned with a clear conscience to the quiet nook I had found in the vast forest; to that domestic corner reserved for me in Dame Nature's grand and wondrous saloon: to that rude home so far removed from the generality of mankind, but so close to the kings and princes of the animal kingdom, commonly called—wild beasts.
