So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed, and occasionally murdered--a mean rogue, abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the Englishman’s threats to depart, holding his throne so long as the white yacht gave him prestige; but all this with pomp and circumstance, display of gems and gold, a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and royal salutes on the very slightest pretext. But all the population was given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest was closing in on ruined farms. The last and only hope of the nation was in Brooke. Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the prime minister, a polite and gentlemanly rascal, and at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke quite seriously by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice. Brooke cleared his ship for action, and with a landing party under arms marched to the palace gates. In a few well-chosen words he explained Makota’s villainy, showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own was safe, and that the only course was to proclaim Brooke as governor. No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s party vanished, the villain fled, the rajah began to behave, the government of the country was handed over to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings. “My darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but I want some things from home very much; so I must trust to your being rich enough to afford them to me. Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly, an electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large magic lantern; fourthly, a rifle which carries fifty balls; and last, a peep-show. The circle and rifle I want very much; and the others are all for political purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such an act as that letter? But then, look at the government he replaced: “The sultan and his chiefs rob all classes of Malays to the utmost of their power; the Malays rob the Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as they dare, consistent with the safety of their wives and children.” Brooke found his private income a very slender fund when he had to pay the whole expense of governing a kingdom until the people recovered from their ruin. February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to make treaty with the new king. “He inquired, if a tribe pirated on my territory what I intended to do. My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me--your friend--leave to steal a few heads occasionally?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a hundred Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He recurred to this request several times--‘just to steal one or two’-as a schoolboy asks for apples.” Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission to go to Singapore and attack the English. [Illustration: SIR JAMES BROOKE]