MALAY SKETCHES
when he is hungry, has no toys, is never whipped, and hardly ever cries.
Until he is fifteen or sixteen, this atmosphere of a better world remains about him. He is often studious even, and duty learns to read the Koran in a language he does not understand.
Then, well then, from sixteen to twenty-five or later he is to be avoided. He takes his pleasure, sows his wild oath like youths of a higher civilisation, is extravagant, open-handed, gambles, gets into debt, runs away with his neighbour's wife, and generally asserts himself. Then follows a period when he either adopts this path and pursues it, or, more commonly, he weans himself gradually from an indulgence that has not altogether realized his expectation, and if, under the advice of older men, he seeks and obtains a position of credit and use-fulness in society from which he begins at last to earn some profit, he will, from the age of forty, probably develop into an intelligent man of miserly and rather grasping habits with some one little pet indulgence of no very expensive kind.
The Malay girl-child is not usually so attractive in appearance as the boy, and less consideration is shown to her. She runs wild till the time comes for investing her in a garment, that is to say when
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