finger-nails. It looks fearfully near of kin to us, and yet the gulf is
measureless. It can climb anywhere, and take long leaps. This morning
it went into a house in which a cluster of bananas is hanging, leaped
up to the roof, and in no time had peeled two, which it ate very
neatly. It has not even a rudimentary tail. When it sits with its arms
folded it looks like a gentlemanly person in a close-fitting fur suit.

The village of Klang is not interesting. It looks like a place which
has "seen better days," and does not impress one favorably as regards
the prosperity of the State. Above it the river passes through rich
alluvial deposits, well adapted for sugar, rice, and other products of
low-lying tropical lands; but though land can be purchased on a system
of deferred payments for two dollars an acre, these lands are still
covered with primeval jungle. Steam-launches and flattish-bottomed
native boats go up the river eighteen miles farther to a village called
Damarsara, from which a good country road has been made to the great
Chinese village and tin mines of Kwala Lumpor. The man-eating tigers,
which almost until now infested the old jungle track, have been driven
back, and plantations of tobacco, tapioca, and rice have been started
along the road. On a single Chinese plantation, near Kwala Lumpor,
there are over two thousand acres of tapioca under cultivation, and the
enterprising Chinaman who owns it has imported European steam machinery
for converting the tapioca roots into the marketable article. Whatever
enterprise I hear of in the interior is always in the hands of
Chinamen. Klang looks as if an incubus oppressed it, and possibly the
Chinese are glad to be as far as possible from the seat of what
impresses me as a fussy Government. At all events, Klang, from whatever
cause, has a blighted look; and deserted houses rapidly falling into
decay, overgrown roads, fields choked with weeds, and an absence of
life and traffic in the melancholy streets, have a depressing