THE EXPERIENCES OF RÂJA HAJI HAMID
THESE things were told to me by Râja Haji Hamid as he and I lay smoking on our sleeping-mats during the cool still hours before the dawn. He was a member of the Royal Family of Sĕlângor, and he still enjoyed throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula the immense reputation for valour, invulnerability, successful homicides, and other manly qualities and achievements which had made him famous ere ever the white men came. He had accompanied me to the east coast as chief of my followers—an excellent band of ruffians who (to use the phrase at that time current among them) were helping me to serve as "the bait at the tip of the fish-hook" at the court of the Sultan of an independent Malay state. He had been induced to accept this post partly out of friendship for me, but mainly because he was thus enabled to turn his back for a space upon the deplorably monotonous and insipid conditions to which British rule had reduced his own country, and because, in the lawless land wherein I was then acting as political agent, he saw a prospect of renewing some of the stirring experiences of his youth.
Râja Haji and I had passed the evening in the Sultan's bâlai, or hall of state, watching the Chinese
