her, Tuan, lest some evil thing befall."

The instinct of the white man always bids him promptly disregard every warning that a native may give to him, and act in a manner diametrically opposed to that which a native may advise. This propensity has added considerably to the figures that represent the European death rate throughout Asia, and, incidentally, it has led to many of the acts of heroism that have won for Englishmen their Eastern empire. It has also set the native the hard task of deciding whether he is most astonished at the courage or the stupidity of the men who rule him. I have lived

long enough among natives to know that there is generally a sound reason for any warnings that they may be moved to give; but Nature, as usual, was stronger than common-sense, so I shook my arm free from the headman's grip, and walked up to the figure in front of me.

It was, as I had seen, that of a woman bowed beneath a heavy burden-a woman still young, not ill-looking, and with the truest, most tenderly feminine eyes that I think I have ever chanced upon. I only noticed this later, and perhaps a knowledge of her story helped them to quicken my perceptions, but at the moment my attention was completely absorbed by the strange bundle which she bore. It was a shapeless thing wrapped in an old cloth, soiled and tattered and horribly stained, which was slung over the woman's left shoulder, across her breast, and

under her right armpit. Out of the bundle, just above the base of the woman's own neck, there protruded a head which lolled backwards as she moved

grey white in colour, hairless, sightless, featureless, formless, an object of horror and repulsion. Near her shoulders two stumps, armed with ugly bosses at their tips, protruded from the bundle, motiveless limbs that swayed and gesticulated loosely; near her own hips two similar members hung down almost to the ground, dangling limply as the woman walked— limbs that showed grey in the evening light, and ended in five whitish patches where the toes should have been. It was а

leper far gone in the disease whom the woman was carrying riverwards. She did not pause when I spoke to her, rather she seemed to quicken her pace, and presently she and her burden, the shapeless head and limbs of the latter bobbing impotently as the jolts shook them, disappeared down the shelving bank in the direction of the running water.

I stood still where she had left me, horrified at what I had seen,-for lepers, or indeed deformed people of any kind, are remarkably rare among the healthy Malay villagers, and the unexpected encounter had shocked and sickened me. Of the men in the group behind me, some laughed, one or two uttered a few words of cheap jeer and taunt, every one of them turned aside to spit solemnly in token that some unclean thing had been at hand, and the headman, newly appointed and

"Thy pardon, Tûan," he said. ""Tis an ill-omened sight, and verily I crave thy forgiveness. It is not fitting that she should thus pass and repass athwart the track, walked in by such as thou art, bearing so unworthy a load. I hope that thou wilt pardon her and the village. Truly she is a bad woman thus to bring this shame upon our folk."

"Who is she?" I asked. "She is a woman of this village, -one devoid of shame. And behold this day she hath smudged soot upon the faces of all our folk by thus wantonly passing across thy path with her man, the leper, and presently I will upbraid her,—yea, verily, I will upbraid her with pungent words!"

66

"Is she also unclean?" I asked.

"No, Tuan, the evil sickness hath not fallen upon her-yet. But her man is sore stricken, and though we, who are of her blood, plead with her unceasingly, bidding her quit this man, as by Muhammad's law she hath the right now to do, she will by no means hearken to our words; for, Tuan, she is a woman of a hard and evil heart, very obstinate and headstrong." He spoke quite simply the thought that was in his mind. In his eyes there was nothing of heroism, nothing of the glory of most tender womanhood, in the sight of this girl's self-sacrifice: to him and to his fellows her conduct was merely a piece of rank folly, the wanton whim of

and persuasions of those who wished her well. He had even less sympathy with me when, regarding the matter from my own point of view, I spoke to him in her praise.

"Of a truth," I said, "this woman of thy village is greater than any of her kind of whom I have heard tell in all this land of Pahang. Thy village, O Penghulu, hath a right to be proud of this leper's wife. I charge thee say no word of reproach to her concerning the crossing of my path, and give her this 'tis but a small sumand tell her that it is given in token of the honour in which I hold her."

This unexpected way of regarding a matter, which had long been a topic of conversation in the village, was altogether unintelligible to the Malays about me; but most of them had long ago abandoned the task of trying to understand the strange motions of the European mind,--an endeavour which they had become convinced was hopeless. Money, however, is a valuable and honourable commodity, and whatever else he may fail to appreciate, this is a matter well within the comprehension of the Malay of every class. Even in the minds of the simplest villagers, the possession of anything which is likely to bring in cash inspires something near akin to awe, and therefore my small gift had the effect of immediately drying up the undercurrent of taunts and jeers at the expense of Mînah and her husband which had been audible

among the headman's followers ever since the strange pair had come into view. Moreover, as I knew full well, the fact that I had spoken of her with words of praise, and had backed my remarks with silver, would do much to increase the importance of, and add to the consideration shown to, this brave wife by the people among whom she lived.

"Tell her also," I said, as I got into my boat to begin the journey down stream-"tell her also that if there be aught in which she standeth in need of my aid, now or hereafter, she hath but to come to me, or to send me word, and I will help her in her affliction according to the measure of my ability." "Tûan!” cried an assenting chorus of villagers, as my boat pushed out from the bank and my men seized their paddles for the homeward row. And thus ended my first encounter with Mînah, the woman of the Muhammadans, whom neither the threats of the village elders, the advice of her relations, the tears and entreaties of her sisters, nor the invitations of those who would have wed with her, had power to lure away from the side of the shapeless wreck of humanity whom she called husband.

Later, I made it my business to inquire from those who knew concerning this woman and her circumstances, and all that I learned tended to increase the admiration which from the beginning I had felt for her.

Like all Malay women, she had been married when hardly

more than a child to a man whom she had barely seen—to whom, prior to her wedding, she would not for her life have been guilty of the indecency of speaking a syllable. On a certain day she had been decked out in all the finery and gold ornaments that her people could borrow from their neighbours for many miles around, had been placed upon a dais side by side with the man she was to wed, and had remained there in an agony of cramped limbs and painful embarrassment while the village-folkwho represented all the world. of which she had any knowledge-ate their fill of the rich viands set before them, and thereafter chanted discordantly many verses from the Kurân in sadly mispronounced Arabic. This terrible publicity, for one who had hitherto been kept in utter seclusion on the pára, or shelf-like upper apartment, of her father's house, almost deprived the dazed little girl of her faculties; and she had been too abjectly frightened even to cry, far less to lift her eyes from her scarlet finger-tips, on which the henna showed like blood-stains, to steal a glimpse of the man to whose tender mercies her parents were surrendering her.

Then, the wedding over with all its attendant ceremonies, for days she had been utterly miserable. She was horribly afraid of her new lord, terrified almost to death, like a little bird in the hand of its captor. Το this poor child, not yet in her "teens," a man and a stranger was much what the ogre of the

fairy tales is to the imagination of other little girls of about the same age in our nurseries at home,—a creature all-powerful, cruel, relentless, against whose monstrous strength her puny efforts at resistance could nought avail. All women who are wives by contract, rather than by inclination, experience something of this agony of fear when first they find themselves at the mercy of a man; but for the girls of a Muhammadan population this instinctive dread of the husband has a tenfold force. During all the days of her life the woman of the Muhammadans has seen the power of the man undisputed and unchecked by the female members of his household; she has seen, perhaps, her own mother put away, after many years of faithfulness and love, because her charms have faded and her lord had grown weary of her; she has seen the married women about her cowed by a word, or even a look, from the man who holds in his hands an absolute right to dispose of his wife's destiny; she has watched the men eating their meals apart alone, if no other member of the masculine sex chanced to be present, because, forsooth, women are deemed to be unworthy to partake of food with their superiors; and as a result of all these things, the woman of the Muhammadans has learned to believe from her heart that, in truth, man is fashioned in a mould more honourable than that in which the paltry folk of her own sex are cast, that he is indeed nobler, higher, greater in every way than

woman; and thus as she looks ever upwards at him the man dazzles her, and fills her simple, trustful soul with fear and awe.

So poor little Mînah had been frightened out of her wits by the bare thought of being handed over to a husband for his service and pleasure, and her gratitude to her man had been extravagant and passionate in its intensity when she found that he was unchangingly kind and tender to her. For Mâmat, the man to whom this poor child had been so early mated, was a gentle, kind-hearted, tender-mannered fellow, a typical villager of the interior, lazy, indolent, and pleasure - loving, but courteous of manner, soft of speech, and caressing by instinct as are so many folk of the kindly Malayan stock. He too, perhaps, had been moved with pity for the wild-eyed little girl, who trembled when she addressed him in quavering monosyllables, and he found a new pleasure in soothing and petting her. by little, his almost paternal feeling for his child-wife turned in due season to a man's strong love, and awoke in her breast a woman's passionate and enthusiastic devotion. So Mâmat and Mînah were happy for a space, although no children were born to them, and Mînah fretted secretly, when the hut was still at night-time, for she knew that there was truth in what the women of the village whispered, saying that no wife might hope to hold the fickle heart of a man unless there were baby fingers to add their

And thus, little

clutching grip to her own desperate but feeble graspings.

Two or three seasons had come and gone since the "Feast of the Becoming One" had joined Mâmat and Mînah together as man and wife. The rich yellow crop in the ricefield had been reaped laboriously ear by ear, and the good grain had been garnered. The ploughs had been set agoing once more across the dry meadows, and in the swamps the buffaloes had been made to dance clumsily by yelling, sweating men, until the soft earth had been kneaded into a quagmire. Then the planting had begun, and later all the village had marked with intense interest the growth and the development of the crop, till once more the time had arrived for the reaping, and again the ugly bark rice-stores were full to overflowing with fat yellow grain. Mînah and Mâmat had aided in the work of cultivation, and had watched Nature giving birth to her myriad offspring with unfailing regularity, and still no little feet pattered over the lath flooring of their hut, no little voice made merry music in their compound. Mâmat seemed to have become more melancholy than of old, and he frequently returned from the fields complaining of fever, and lay down to rest tired and depressed. Mînah tended him carefully, with gentle loving hands, but she told herself that the day was drawing near which would bring the co-wife, who should bear sons to her husband, to oust her

from Mâmat's heart. Therefore, when her man was absent, she would weep furtively as she sat alone among the cookingpots in the empty hut, and many were the vows of rich offerings to be devoted to the shrines of the local saints if only the joy of motherhood might be hers.

One afternoon Mâmat came back to the hut, and, as was his wont, for he was ever tender to his childless wife, and anxious to aid her in her work, he fell to boiling water at the little mud fireplace at the back of the central living-room, where Mînah was cooking the evening meal. While he was so engaged his masculine fingers touched the pot clumsily, causing it to tip off the iron tripod upon which it had been resting. The boiling water streamed over the fingers of his right hand, and Mînah screamed shrilly in sympathy for the pain which she knew that he must be enduring; but Mâmat looked up at her with wondering eyes.

"What ails thee, Little One?" he asked without a trace of suffering in his voice.

"The water is boiling hot," cried Mînah. "Ya Allah! How evil is my destiny that because, unlike other men, thou wouldst stoop to aid me in my work, so great a hurt hath befallen thee! O, Weh, Weh, my heart is very sad because this trouble hath come to thee. Let me bind thy fingers; see, here is oil and much rag, clean and soft."

"What ails thee, Little One?" Mâmat asked again, staring at her uncomprehend