good looks and bright colors. Here again the Chinese, who number
forty-five thousand souls, are becoming commercially the most important
of the immigrant races, as they have long been numerically and
industrially. In Georgetown, besides selling their own and all sorts of
foreign goods at reasonable rates in small shops, they have large
mercantile houses, and, as elsewhere, are gradually gaining a
considerable control over the trade of the place. They also occupy
positions of trust in foreign houses, and if there were a strike among
them all business, not excepting that of the Post Office, would come to
a standstill. I went into the Mercantile Bank and found only Chinese
clerks, in the Post Office and only saw the same, and when I went to
the "P. and O." office to take my berth for Ceylon, it was still a
Chinaman, imperturbable, taciturn, independent, and irreproachably
clean, with whom I had to deal in "pidjun English." They are everywhere
the same, keen, quick-witted for chances, markedly self-interested,
purpose-like, thrifty, frugal, on the whole regarding honesty as the
best policy, independent in manner as in character, and without a trace
of "Oriental servility."


Georgetown, February 11th.--I have not seen very much in my two days;
indeed, I doubt whether there is much to see, in my line at least; nor
has the island any interesting associations as Malacca has, or any
mystery of unexplored jungle as in Sungei Ujong and Selangor. Pinang
came into our possession in 1786, through the enterprise of Mr. Light,
a merchant captain, who had acquired much useful local knowledge by
trading to Kedah and other Malay States. The Indian Government desired
a commercial "emporium" and a naval station in the far east, and Mr.
Light recommended this island, then completely covered with forest, and
only inhabited by two migratory families of Malay fishermen, whose huts