During one of my visits to the Sakarang I heard a story which is rather French in its termination. A young man proposed to a girl and was accepted by her, but her parents refused to give their consent, as he was of very inferior birth. Every means was tried to soften their hearts, but they were obstinate, and endeavoured to induce her to give up her lover and marry another. In their despair the lovers retired to the jungle, and swallowed the poisonous juice of the tuba plant: next morning they were found dead, with their cold and stiff arms entwined round each other. Cases are not of very rare occurrence among the Sakarang Dayaks, where disappointed love has sought solace in the grave. Of the warmth of married affection, I have never heard a more striking instance than the following:--the story has been told before, but it is worth repeating. Ijau, a Balau chief, was bathing with his wife in the Lingga river, a place notorious for man-eating alligators, when Indra Lela, a Malay, passing in a boat remarked,--“I have just seen a very large animal swimming up the stream.” Upon hearing this, Ijau told his wife to go up the steps and he would follow; she got safely up, but he, stopping to wash his feet, was seized by the alligator, dragged into the middle of the stream, and disappeared from view. His wife hearing a cry turned round, and seeing her husband’s fate sprang into the river, shrieking,--“Take me also,” and dived down at the spot where she had seen the alligator sink with his prey. No persuasion could induce her to come out of the water: she swam about, diving in all the places most dreaded from being a resort of ferocious reptiles, seeking to die with her husband; at last her friends came down and forcibly removed her to their house. About two miles below the town of Kuching, is a place called Tanah Putih. Here a man and his wife were working in a small canoe, when an alligator seized the latter by the thigh and bore her along the surface of the water, calling for that help, which her husband swimming after, in vain endeavoured to afford. The bold fellow with a kris in his mouth neared the reptile, but as soon as he was heard, the beast sank with his shrieking prey and ended a scene almost too painful for description. Two days afterwards the body, unmangled, was found hidden in some bushes, which partly confirms my previous remark, that alligators do not immediately swallow their prey.