All up and down the coast, from Sĕdĕli in Johor to the islands near Sĕnggôra, the Fisher Folk are found during the open season. Fleets of smacks leave the villages for the spots along the shore where fish are most plentiful, and for eight months in the year these men live and sleep in their boats. The town of Kuâla Trĕnggânu, however, is the headquarters of the fishing trade, as indeed it is of all the commercial enterprise on this side of the Peninsula. At the point where the Trĕnggânu river falls into the sea, a sandy headland juts out, forming a little bay, to which three conical rocky hills make a background, relieving the general flatness of the coast. In this bay, and picturesquely grouped about the foot of these hills, the thatched houses of the capital, and the cool green fruit groves cluster closely. Innumerable fishing crafts lie at anchor, or are beached along the shore; gaily-dressed natives pass hither and thither, engrossed in their work or play; and the little brown bodies of the naked children fleck the yellow sands. Seen across the dancing waves, and with the appearance of motion which, in this steaming land, the heat-haze gives to even inanimate objects, this scene is indescribably pretty, shining and alive.

But at dawn the prospect is different. The background is the same, but the colour of the scene is less intense, though the dark waves have rosy lights in them reflected from the ruddy sky of the dawn. A slowly paling fire shines here and there upon the shore, and the cool land breeze blows seaward. Borne upon the wind come stealing out a hundred graceful, noiseless fishing smacks. The men aboard them are cold and sleepy. They sit huddled up in the stern, with their sârongs drawn high about their shoulders, under the shadow of the palm-leaf sail, which shows dark above them in the faint light of early morning. The only sound is the whisper of the wind in the rigging, and the song of the forefoot as it drives the water before it in little curving ripples. And so the fleet floats out and out, and presently is lost on the glowing eastern sky-line. At sundown the boats come racing back, heading for the sinking sun, borne on the evening wind, which sets steadily shorewards, and at about the same hour the great seine-boats, with their crews of labouring paddlers, beat out to sea.

So live they, so die they, year in and year out. Toiling and enduring, with no hope or wish for change of scene. Delighting in such simple pleasures as their poor homes afford; surrounded by beauties of nature, which they lack the soul to appreciate; and yet experiencing that keen enjoyment which is born of dancing waves, of pace, of action, and of danger, that thrilling throb of the red blood through the veins, which, when all is said and done, makes up more than half of the joy of living.

It was not always so with them, for within the memory of old men upon the Coast, the Fisher Folk were once pirates to a man. The last survivor of those who formed the old lawless bands was an intimate friend of mine own. When I last saw him, a day or two before his death in 1891, he begged that I would do him one final act of friendship by supplying him with a winding sheet, that he might go decently to his grave under the sods and the spear-grass, bearing thither a token of the love I bore him. It was a good shroud of fine white calico bought in the bazaar, and it cost more than a dollar. But I found it very willingly, for I remembered that I was aiding to remove from the face of the earth, and to lay in his quiet resting-place, the last Pirate on the East Coast.

THE STORY OF BÂYAN THE PAROQUET

Said one among them, 'Surely not in vain
My substance from the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'

Omar Khayya’m.

Life—meaning the life which animates the bodies of other people—is not priced high by the natives of the East Coast; but eight or nine years ago, it was held even more lightly than it is at present. Murder was frequently done for the most trivial causes, and a Malay often drew a knife, when an Englishman would have been content to drop a damn. Young Chiefs were wont to take a life or two from pure galeté de cœur, merely to show that they were beginning to feel their feet, and were growing up brave and manly as befitted their descent. Such doings were not regarded altogether with disfavour by the boy's parents,—for, in a rude state of society, a Chief must be feared before he is loved, if his days are to be long in the land,—and some of the older men encouraged their sons to make a kill, much in the same spirit which animated parents in Europe half a century ago, when they put a finishing touch to the education of their children by sending them on the Grand Tour. Some fathers went even further than this, and Râja Haji Hamid once told me that he killed his first man when he was a child of eleven or twelve, his victim being a very thin, miserable-looking Chinaman, upon whom his father bade him try his 'prentice hand. The Chinaman had done no evil, but he was selected because he was feeble and decrepit, and would show no fight even if attacked by a small boy with a kris. Râja Haji told me that he botched the killing a good deal, but that he hacked the life out of the Chinaman at last, though the poor wretch, like Charles II., took an unconscionable time adying. Death to this Chinaman must have only been one degree less unpleasant than it was to the man who