MALAY SKETCHES
continually led him into difficulty, and he smoked opium to excess and to the neglect of all his duties and his interests; moreover, he lacked courage, and sought counsel from men of no standing, whose only thought was their own profit.
A Malay Raja has many wives. He begins early and rings the changes often, until (especially if he have pretensions to become ultimately the ruler of his country, as was the case with Iskander) his relatives decide that he should marry a lady of his own rank. Then, if he is young, her people usually insist that any wife he has must be divorced, and, that done, the marriage takes place.
At the time of which I write, Raja Iskander had been married to Maimûnah for about three years; she was the mother of two children, but her husband thought he had good reason to doubt her fidelity, and he was palpably neglecting her for a concubine. That he should have other wives or concubines was of course only what she had been educated to expect, and, in acting on his right, Raja Iskander was simply following the practice of his ancestors and the custom of the country. The Muhammadan
law is nevertheless extremely strict in its injunctions that all wives are to be treated with equal considera-
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