rice plot tilled and the crop weeded, and the precious grain stored safely, without clearly knowing how the work had been done at such comparatively slight cost to herself. And thus Minah and her man spent many years of the joint life that even the Demon of the Lep- rosy had been powerless to rob of all its sweetness.
It was some time after the white men had placed Pahang under their protection, with the amiable object of quieting that troubled and lawless land, that a new terror came to Minah. Men whispered together in the villages that the strange pale-faced folk who now ruled the country had many ordinances known to the old Rajas. The eccentricities and excesses of the latter were hair-erecting things, but to them the people were inured by the accumulated experience of generations, whereas the ways of the white men were inconsequent and inscrutable. The laws which they promulgated were unhallowed by Custom the greatest of all Malayan fetishes--and were not endeared to the native population by age or tradition; and one of them, it was said, provided for the segregation of lepers. In other words, it was the habit of white folk to sentence lepers to imprisonment for life, precisely as though it were a crime for a man to fall a victim to a disease! Minah listened to this talk, and was stricken dumb with misery and bewilderment, as the village elders, mumbling their discontent concerning a dozen lying rumours, spoke also of this measure as one likely to be put in force in Palang.
