Province Wellesley - Water Buffaloes - A Glorious Night - Perak
Officials - A "Dismal Swamp" - Elephants at Home - An Epigrammatic
Description - The British Residency at Taipeng - Sultan Abdulla's Boys - A
Chinese Mining Town - The "Armed Police" - An Alligator's Victim - Major
Swinburne - A Larut Dinner Party - A Morning Hymn
BRITISH RESIDENCY, LARUT, February 11.
I left Mr. Justice Wood's yesterday, and his servant dispatched me from
the jetty in a large boat with an attap awning and six Kling rowers,
whose oars worked in nooses of rope. The narrow Strait was very calm,
and the hot, fiery light of the tropic evening resting upon it, made it
look like oil rather than water. In half an hour I landed on the other
side in the prosperous Province Wellesley, under a row of magnificent
casuarina trees, with gray, feathery foliage drooping over a beach of
corals and, behind which are the solemn glades of cocoa-nut groves. On
the little jetty a Sikh policeman waited for me; and presently Mrs.
Isemonger, wife of the police magistrate of the Province, met me on the
bright, green lawn studded with clumps of alamanda, which surrounds
their lovely, palm-shaded bungalow.
Though the shadows were falling, Mr. Isemonger took me to see something
of the back country in a trap with a fiery Sumatra pony. There are
miles of cocoa-nut plantations belonging to Chinamen all along the
coast, with the trees in straight lines forming long, broad avenues,
which have a certain gloomy grandeur about them.
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