pound will be ringing with the songs he loves to bellow. It is not possible to abash Ûmat.
I first met him in 1890 when, after a year spent in Europe, I returned to Pahang for a second tour of service at the ripe age of twenty-four, and took charge of the districts which form the interior of that country. I was very lonely. I had served for a long time as political agent at the Sultan's court before the British Government assumed a more ac- tive part in the administration of the state, but at that time I had had with me some thirty Malays who had come from the other side of the Peninsula to share my fortunes and to keep me company. These were now scattered to the winds, and I had none but strangers around me. There were a few mining- camps spattered about the district, but of the Euro- peans who lived in them I saw little, except when I visited them. The Pahang Malays eyed us with suspicion, and stood aloof, for their chiefs did not encourage a friendly attitude toward a set of intruders in whose presence they saw a menace to their power and privileges, while the peasantry had still to learn that we were able to deliver them from the oppression to which custom had almost reconciled them. For a space, therefore, I was in a position of quite extraor- dinary isolation, and I found the experience suffi- ciently dreary.
Pahang had had an ill name on the east coast of the Peninsula any time during the past three hundred years, and until the white men "protected" the
