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the river, and when Saleh entered his mother's room he found the place in great disorder. Tungku Ampuan was screaming with rage. Mûnah was in tears, very real tears, not only of mortification, but of pain; for Tungku Ampuan had been practising upon her some of the minor tortures which it was the dream of that worthy woman to inflict upon "that slut Jebah." Saleh himself was greeted with virulent upbraidings.

"Ya Allah! Ya Tuhan-ku!" screamed Tungku Ampuan when the first spate of violence was expended. "That a son of mine should so disgrace my house! That he should thus smudge soot upon my face, soot that may not be wiped away! That he should speak of marriage with a wench such as this accursed Mûnah! What have I done, what crime have I committed, that so great an infamy should befall me! Ya Allah! Ya Tûhan-ku! Ambûi! O ma!" Saleh was utterly bewildered.

"But what is it? What have I done?" he cried.

"It is not thee, my unhappy one, it is not thee!" sobbed his mother. "It is this accursed girl who, making use of magic and love-potions, hath done us all dishonor. She hath certainly taken advantage of the opportunities conferred by thine illness, and thus it is, beyond all doubt, that thou art this day devoured by the 'madness,'-madness of this hussy's making,-else surely thou hadst never dreamed of an act as shameful as marriage with this Mûnah-thing, this scrap left over from the dish whence many have eaten!"

"But it was thee, mother, who in the beginning bade me take this girl," protested Saleh. "In this Court of Pelesu, seemingly, a man may not live single and at peace. The girl pleases me, and I design to take her to wife, if only to silence wanton tongues that weave for ever false stories about my name." "Ya Allah! Ya Tuhan-ku!" cried

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Tungku Ampuan in a species of despair. "Heard ye ever the like? Take the girl if she pleases thee. Hang her on high, sell her in a distant land, burn her with fire, souse her with water, scorch her with the sun-rays, do with her what thou wilt-she and all her kind are thy property from generation to generation! A thousand times have I bidden thee take her: but marry her! ! ! Ya Allah, Muhammad!"

As of old, the baffling diversity of the point of view which he owed to his English training and that of his own people rose up as a barrier separating Saleh from his kind. Too often, he realized, his right was their wrong, his wrong their right. On this occasion, however, he was not prepared to compromise. Raja Haji Abdullah had instructed him in the teachings of his religion, and the lessons had not been taught in vain. Saleh could see no sense in sinning when marriage and di

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were such simple affairs, and duly sanctioned by the religious law. Therefore he held firmly to his resolution, bribed a priest to perform the ceremony in his bungalow across the river, and took Mûnah to wife. His action caused a hideous scandal, and the King and Tungku Ampuan alike were furious. The latter even went the length of complaining to Baker that Saleh had abducted one of her girls, and an embarrassing explanation became necessary. Tungku Ampuan was informed that the girl was a free agent, and that Saleh had married her legally. The latter fact, it was piously supposed, would pour balm upon her wounded feelings, whereas, of course, it was precisely this detail which was the occasion of her wrath. Saleh suffered horribly during the whole transaction, and was conscious of a feeling of meanness, almost of treachery, because his action was upheld by the white men in defiance of native prejudice.

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The only remedy that could be found for the dishonor which Saleh's family had brought upon his house lay in his marriage to a wife of his own rank, and negotiations to this end were speedily set agoing. Now, in the vernacular, when some great domestic event is in progress in the royal household, the phrase used is, "The King worketh," and considered as "work" it is in truth an extraordinary manifestation of energy. Languid pourparlers are protracted during weeks and weeks of indolent negotiation; still more languid preparations for the ceremonies are made during several ensuing months, the monotony being broken by periodical processions,-the procession of water for the bathing of the bride and bridegroom, which is accompanied by much aquatic romping; the procession of the henna, for the staining of the toe- and finger-nails; the procession of rice, for the bridal banquet; and, finally, the procession of the bride and bridegroom themselves. The objects to be borne in procession are placed on enormous tinsel litters, under the weight of which fifty bearers stagger, and all the warriors of the Court dance madly around and in advance of it with naked weapons brandished aloft, wild, excited faces and shrill outcry. Later there is a banquet spread in the King's hall, and the whole population are fed at the royal charges, but the offerings which custom exacts render the busi

ness sufficiently profitable. Now, however, that loyalty finds no stimulus from fear, the expenditure is apt to exceed the receipts, greatly to the injury of the royal temper.

All these ceremonies took place duly, and every evening there was much gambling in the hall of state. The King was combining Saleh's marriage with the circumcision of little Tungku Anjang, his son by Che' Jebah, and the two half-brothers shared the honors of the occasion. Saleh threw himself into the enjoyment of the time with zest, it was all in a fashion a revival of the Past, and there were moments when he found it possible to cheat himself into the illusion that Malaya was still as it of old had been. Even when he found himself decked out wonderfully in tinsel and gold ornaments, seated upon a vast litter surrounded by a dancing, whooping crowd of temporary maniacs, he was thrilled rather than embarrassed. Inherited memories seemed to stir in him and make the whole experience congenial. He had obtained three months' leave of absence for the purpose of celebrating his marriage, and the sight of Baker walking in the crowd and looking at his quondam assistant with amused eyes did not disturb him. To-day Baker was nobody in that throng, and he, Saleh, had come to his own for a space.

The girl selected to be his bride was a first cousin, a child of twelve, whom Saleh had never even seen. She was

to him, and to most people apparently, the least important detail in the transaction. Saleh himself rather shirked the thought of her. He foresaw that she would bore him, and the memory of all that he had once dreamed that marriage might mean to him would arise to stab and torture him.

His marriage with Mûnah had not. been a success. The palace-bred girl spoke to him quite openly, nay, boastfully, of her numerous amours, which

she held to be so many proofs of her irresistible attractions, and Saleh would catch himself writhing with anger when he met any of the heroes of these love-affairs. There again the English half of him made unnecessary trouble, for Malays care nothing for the past of a woman. Their sole concern is with her present, and Mûnah, knowing this, made herself hateful in her husband's eyes when most bent upon exciting his admiration. She was extravagant, too, sought wit in pertness, was capricious, and had never acquired the habit of fidelity. Saleh knew-and the knowledge made him miserable-that he could not trust her for a moment, and that life in the palace had taught her to reduce deception to a fine art. The whole position was humiliating, and his knowledge of what purity in womanhood can be such purity of thought and feeling as he had noted in Mrs. Le Mesurier and others of her kind-made it frankly intolerable.

Very soon Mûnah was divorced and replaced by another wife, married according to Muhammadan law, who presently was in her turn divorced. Once begun, the process was fatally easy to continue, and before the first twelvemonth of his stay at the Court was ended, Saleh had been married and divorced four or five times, and was Blackwood's Magazine.

leading a life which, to a European, was indistinguishable from one of violent dissipation.

Marriage with his first royal wife, little Tungku Meriam, wrought no change. The girl was a mere child, frightened out of her wits of Saleh, tongue-tied in his presence, without an idea seemingly in her little empty head. Though she was of his own class, and could "thee" and "thou" him publicly without offence, she was even less of a companion than the other women who passed in rapid succession through his household.

Saleh all this while, be it remembered, was obeying the letter of his creed. His sin, if sin there were, lay

in the fact that he had allowed himself to be weaned from his ideal, the ideal which a marriage with such a girl as Alice Fairfax typified, yet it was not his fault that such a union had been denied to him by circumstances. The pathos of the whole position centred in the fact that he had been shown the light, had been taught to long for it unspeakably, and then had been shut out into the exterior darkness. Now, having seen the light, he knew that this indeed was darkness, and in it he found much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

(To be continued.)

SWINBURNE LETTERS.

[The following letters, written by Algernon Charles Swinburne to Edmund Clarence Stedman are in the possession of the latter's granddaughter, Miss Laura Stedman. In view of the peculiar interest which attaches to them at the present time, Miss Stedman considered that their publication should not be delayed until the completion of the biography of her grandfather, upon which she is now engaged. It is by

the special courtesy of Miss Laura Stedman and of Mr. Swinburne's sole executor, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, that we are able to print them.-Editor of The London Times.]

LANDOR.

Holmwood, Henley-on-Thames.
January 21, 1874.

My dear Mr. Stedman,-I have just received your letter with the very grace

ful stanzas for music enclosed in it, announcing and accompanying the gift of the beautiful volume of selections from Landor; for all which I thank you at once most sincerely, as also for what I have not received-possibly through some misdirection or miscarriage which may yet be rectified-the note of two or three months since containing your ar ticle on Landor, which I should much like to see.

I congratulate you with all my heart on having done that article Fate disappointed my once cherished hope of doing. As the property of Landor's works is vested (I understand) in his friend and biographer Mr. Forster, who told me a good many years ago that he designed himself to edit a sélection from the verse as well as the prose, it is of course impossible for me to intrude on his ground, and would be improper to solicit as a favor the leave which Mr. Browning has more than once, since he was informed of my original intention, and the only reason which compelled me to resign it, kindly offered to procure for me from Mr. Forster; whose selection, when it does appear, will, I hope, be an improvement on the system of extracts given in his biography of Landor: which was not, I think, a very judicious example of the representation of a great writer by specimens and excerpts.

I am truly and deeply gratified by the great honor which you have done me in prefixing to your selection verses which I only wish were worthier of the high place assigned to them than I can honestly hope or believe them to be. I never thought them adequate to the subject in any way except perhaps as an expression of personal feeling, which may be thought to give them their only worth to which they can pretend; but their inadequacy is now more potent and flagrant in my own eyes than ever: though this does not diminish my pleasure in seeing them, or my sense of obligation to you for placing them, at the head of your beautiful anthology; from which I only regret to miss two or three of my especial favorites among the glorious multitude of flowers from which you have chosen so many and so well: for example, the "one white violet" (on E. Arundell), a

fit companion to "Rose Aylmer," as a flower of life might be to one of death; the "cistus"—

Smoothen thy petals now Her Floral Fates allow;

the two on the deaths of Ternissa and Epicurus ("Ternissa! you are fled!" and "Behold, behold me, whether thou," &c.); the quatrain beginning, "To my ninth decade I have tottered on"-unless rejected as too painful to students who love his memory; the palinode or recantation (so to call it) of the "Epitaph at Fiesole"

Never must my bones be laid

Under the mimosa's shade;

and the lofty and pathetic "expostulation" of Sappho "Forget thee? When? thou biddest me? dost thou?"

But, above all, I wonder to find wanting the very brightest (in my eyes at least) of all the jewels in Landor's crown of song; the divine four lines on "Dirce," which hold the place in my affections that those on "Rose Aylmer" did in Lamb's

Stand close around, ye Stygian set, With Dirce in one boat conveyed! Or Charon, seeing, may forget

That he is old and she a shade.

If ever verses besides her own were, in Sappho's phrase, "more golden than gold," surely these are. I looked again and again through your book in search of them, unable to believe that I had not at first accidentally passed over the page which they should have glorified. There is the whole Anthologie- all of it, I mean what is really composed of flowers-distilled in its essence into that one quatrain. These too, I think, might have found a place among their fellows:-"The leaves are falling; so am I"; "Ye little household gods, that make," &c. "Twenty years hence"; I think I am not wrong in saying that they are not among your Cameos, but I have not time to look again before the post goes out, and I do not wish to let one day pass without thanking you for the gift of them. I should like to send you in return, if the publisher had sent

me any copies as I expected and as he hitherto has not, a book of memorial verses-"Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier" to which I have contributed ten little poems of the elegiac or ἐπιτομίδιον order-two in English, two in French, one in Latin, and five "Epigrams" in Greek after the Anthologic pattern-a polyglot freak which has not been emulated by the other contributors in French, English, Italian, German, and Provençal and other dialects. Lemarre has published it in a very pretty form, and Victor Hugo heads our list superbly. (I should like to have seen in your selection Landor's late verses to him, and those earliest of all, which I have just remembered, written at school on Godiva and worth all that have been written on her since, however exquisite-"In every hour, in every mood.")

I trust you will prosper in the good and enviable work of diffusing among Americans the knowledge and love of Landor-they must be one with all readers worthy to know him. Pray remember me very kindly to Mr. Stoddard and believe me,

A. C. Swinburne.

LANDOR: LATIN VERSE: ENGLISH

ELEGIES.

Holmwood, Henley-on-Thames,
February 23rd, 1874.

My dear Mr. Stedman,-I have so much to say in answer to your last despatches that I fear I may be tempted to exceed at once the bounds of the post and the limits of your patience if I write at such length as I wish we could talk together. First of all, even before Thanksgiving, let me say that in my opinion you have written the very best study containing the very truest estimate of Landor's genius that has ever yet been achieved. The only drop of qualifying bitterness in the pleasure with which I read and reread it rises from the regret that it could not have come nine years before instead of after he went back to the Olympians; for I remember well how pleasant and how precious, for all his high self-reliance, the sincere tribute of genuine and studious admiration was even at the last to the old demigod

with the head and the heart of a lion. I have often ardently wished I could have been born (say) but five years earlier, that my affection and reverence might have been of some use and their expression found some echo while he was yet alive beyond the rooms in The end was which he was to die.

very lonely, and I fear the last echo of any public voice that reached him from England must have been of obloquy and insult. It is true that the lion at whom those asses' kicks were aimed was by no means maimed or clipped as to the claws and teeth. Did you ever see his vindication printed, but I believe not published, after the wretched affair which ended in his angry departure from England? It was trenchant and conclusive, including as it did a letter addressed to himself from the father of the young lady to whom his fatherly goodness and charity had been made the pretext for abuse and slander, thanking him in the most fervent terms of gratitude for the rescue of his daughter..

Possibly you may know all this as well as I, but I have found very few even among the professed friends of Landor's memory who either knew or cared to remember the exact facts of the case; and Forster in his biography has slurred the question over, as I cannot but think, with caution something more than legal and less than friendly. It is a shame that the most faithful and generous in his friendships of all men should have none to speak out for him now without shakings of head or hushings of voice, as though to lament the existence of some deplorable and unmentionable thing, when, as I do most truly believe, the only point in his conduct regrettable and possibly blamable was the substitution of English for Latin and print for manuscript in the expression of a just and honorable anger. If he could but have been content this time also, as so often before, with the sufficiently copious and vigorous repertory of terms to be found in the language of Martial and Catullus! I did not mean to write so much on this matter, but if you do not know the details it is well that you should, and even if you do you will excuse the unpleasant repetition for the love of

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