other devices for killing time, and this with the mercury at 80
degrees! Just now the Maharajah of Johore, sovereign of a small state
on the nearest part of the mainland, a man much petted and decorated by
the British Government for unswerving fidelity to British interests,
has a house here, and his receptions and dinner parties vary the
monotonous round of gayeties.

The native streets monopolize the picturesqueness of Singapore with
their bizarre crowds, but more interesting still are the bazaars or
continuous rows of open shops which create for themselves a perpetual
twilight by hanging tatties or other screens outside the sidewalks,
forming long shady alleys, in which crowds of buyers and sellers
chaffer over their goods, the Chinese shopkeepers asking a little more
than they mean to take, and the Klings always asking double. The bustle
and noise of this quarter are considerable, and the vociferation
mingles with the ringing of bells and the rapid beating of drums and
tom-toms--an intensely heathenish sound. And heathenish this great city
is. Chinese joss-houses, Hindu temples, and Mohammedan mosques almost
jostle each other, and the indescribable clamor of the temples and the
din of the joss-houses are faintly pierced by the shrill cry from the
minarets calling the faithful to prayer, and proclaiming the divine
unity and the mission of Mahomet in one breath.

How I wish I could convey an idea, however faint, of this huge,
mingled, colored, busy, Oriental population; of the old Kling and
Chinese bazaars; of the itinerant sellers of seaweed jelly, water,
vegetables, soup, fruit, and cooked fish, whose unintelligible street
cries are heard above the din of the crowds of coolies, boatmen, and
gharriemen waiting for hire; of the far-stretching suburbs of Malay and
Chinese cottages; of the sheet of water, by no means clean, round which