thigh are used at pleasure to rest the foot. Two or three
played very skilfully, keeping the ball continually flying
about, hut the place was too confined to show off the game
to advantage. One evening a quarrel arose from some
dispute in the game, and there was a great row, and it
was feared there would be a fight about it—not two men
only, but a party of a dozen or twenty on each side, a
regular battle with knives and krisses ; but after a large
amount of talk it passed off quietly, and we heard nothing
about it afterwards.
Most Europeans being gifted by nature with a luxuriant
growth of hair upon their faces, think it disfigures them,
and keep up a continual struggle against her by mowing
down every morning the crop which has sprouted up
during the preceding twenty-four hours. Now the men of
Mongolian race are, naturally, just as many of us want to
be. They mostly pass their lives with faces as smooth and
beardless as an infant’s. But shaving seems an instinct of
the human race ; for many of these people, having no hair
to take off their faces, shave their heads. Others, however,
set resolutely to work to force nature to give them a
beard. One of the chief cock-fighters at Dobbo was a
Javanese, a sort of master of the ceremonies of the ring,
who tied on the spurs and acted as backer-up to one of
the combatants. This man had succeeded, by assidhous
cultivation, in raising a pair of moustaches which were a
triumph of art, for they each contained about a dozen
hairs more than three inches long, and which, being well
greased and twisted, were distinctly visible (when not too
far off) as a black thread hanging down on each side of
his mouth. But the beard to match was the difficulty, for
nature had cruelly refused to give him a rudiment of hair
on his chin, and the most talented gardener could not do
much if he had nothing to cultivate. But true genius
triumphs over difficulties. Although there was no hair
proper on the chin, there happened to be, rather on one
side of it, a small mole or freckle which contained (as
such things frequently do) a few stray hairs. These had
been made the most of. They had reached four or five
inches in length, and formed another black thread dangling
from the left angle of the chin. The owner carried this
as if it were something remarkable (as it certainly was);
he often felt it affectionately, passed it between his fingers,
and was evidently extremely proud of his moustaches and
beard!
One of the most surprising things connected with Am
was the excessive cheapness of all articles of European or
native manufacture. We were here two thousand miles
beyond Singapore and Batavia, which are themselves
emporiums of the “ far east,” in a place unvisited by,
and almost unknown to, European traders; everything
reached us through at least two or three hands, often