Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
page 192 of 382 (50%)
is, I have no doubt that justice is substantially done, for the
Resident is conscientious and truly honorable. He is very lovable, and
is evidently much beloved, and is able to go about in unguarded
security.

It is not far from the Court House to the prison, a wholesomely
situated building on a hill, made of concrete, with an attap roof. The
whole building is one hundred feet long by thirty feet broad. There are
six cells for solitary confinement. A jailer, turnkey, and eight
warders constitute the prison staff. The able-bodied prisoners are
employed on the roads and other public works, and attend upon the
scavengers' cart, which outcome of civilization goes round every
morning! The diet, which costs fourpence a day for each prisoner,
consists of rice and salt fish, but those who work get two-pence
halfpenny a day in addition, with which they can either buy luxuries or
accumulate a small sum against the time when their sentences expire.
Old and weakly people do light work about the prison. One man was
executed for murder last year under a sentence signed by the Datu
Klana. I have not been in a prison since I was in that den of horrors,
the prison of the Naam-Hoi magistrate at Canton, and I felt a little
satisfaction in the contrast.

The same afternoon we all made a very pleasant expedition to the
Sanitarium, a cabin which the Resident has built on a hill three miles
from here. A chair with four Chinese bearers carried Miss Shaw up, her
sister and the two gentlemen walked, and I rode a Sumatra pony, on an
Australian stock-man's saddle, not only up the steep jungle path, but
up a staircase of two hundred steps in which it terminates, the
sagacious animal going up quite cunningly. One charm of a tropical
jungle is that every few yards you come upon something new, and every
DigitalOcean Referral Badge