Malay, and possessed of a pair of dark eyes the expres- sion of which was peculiarly soft and tender. I only noticed this later, and perhaps a knowledge of her story helped then to quicken my perceptions; but at the moment my attention was completely absorbed by the strange bundle which she bore.
It was a shapeless thing, wrapped in an old cloth, soiled and tattered and horribly stained, which was slung over the woman's left shoulder, across her breast, and under her right armpit. Out of the bundle, just above the base of the woman's own neck, there protruded a head that lolled backward as she moved a head, gray-white in colour, hairless, sight- less, featureless, formless-an object of horror and repulsion. Near her shoulders two stumps, armed with ugly bosses at their tips, emerged from the bundle, motiveless limbs that swayed and gestieu- lated loosely. Near her own hips two members, similarly deformed, hung down almost to the ground, dangling limply as the woman walked-limbs that showed a sickly grayish colour in the evening light, and ended in five white patches where the toes should have been. It was a leper far gone in the discase whom the woman was carrying riverward.
She did not pause when I spoke to her. rather she seemed to quicken her pace; and presently she and her burden, the shapeless head and limbs of the latter bobbing impotently as the jolts shook them, disappeared down the river bank in the direction of the running water.
I stood still where she had left me, shocked by what
