I Like Them Very Much,
For, Though They Are So Restless And Mercurial, They Are Neither Rude
Nor Troublesome.
They have kept the house alive with their antics, but
they are just starting on my elephants for Kwala Kangsa, on a visit to
the Regent.
I wonder what will become of them? Their father is an exile
in the Seychelles, and though it was once thought that one of them
might succeed the reigning Rajah, another Rajah is so popular with the
Malays, and so intelligent, that it is now unlikely that his claims
will be set aside.
The steep little hill on which the Residency stands is planted with
miserable coffee, with scanty yellow foliage. The house on my side has
a magnificent view of the beautiful Hijan hills, down which a waterfall
tumbles in a broad sheet of foam only half a mile off, and which breed
a rampageous fresh breeze for a great part of the day. The front
veranda looks down on Taipeng and other Chinese villages, on neat and
prolific Chinese vegetable gardens, on pits, formerly tin mines, now
full of muddy, stagnant water, on narrow, muddy rivulets bearing the
wash of the tin mines to the Larut river, on all the weediness and
forlornness of a superficially exhausted mining region, and beyond upon
an expanse of jungle, the limit of which is beyond the limit of vision,
miles of tree tops as level as the ocean, over which the cloud shadows
sail in purple all day long.
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