They have a curious method of catching prawns in this river: a man sits in the stern of a canoe, a little on one side, so as to make its edge towards the bank almost on a level with the water, and but a foot from the mud. On the same side he has an immense comb fastened at the stern, which, at an angle, stretches beyond the bows of the canoe, and sweeps the bank. The prawns congregating at the very edge of the mud, make a spring to avoid the teeth of the comb; and in doing so, nearly always fall into the boat. The comb is simply a long bamboo, with holes drilled into one side, into which are inserted pieces of thin bamboo or wood about two feet long at the farther end, and gradually lessening as they approach the fisherman. I may also mention that the Malays are very fond of the following sport. They collect many hundred bundles of the roots of the tuba-plant, and beat them out in their canoes, keeping them wet, and permitting the juice, which has an intoxicating property, to flow into the bottom of their boats. When they have sufficient, they throw it into the water at the mouths of the rivers just at the turn of the flood-tide; and the fish, feeling its effects, either rise to the surface completely intoxicated, or, in the case of the large ones, sufficiently stupefied to be easily speared. It is an exciting sport when several hundred men in light canoes are engaged in it. It is a superstition that while they are occupied in this amusement, should a boat pass the mouth of the river, and the crew beat the water with their paddles, the tuba would lose its intoxicating power. Until late years, the general use of money was unknown in the capital. When I first visited it, ordinary commercial transactions were carried on in pieces of gray shirting, valued at 12_s._ 6_d._; of nankin, valued at 10_d._; and of bits of iron, worth about a farthing: the last were manufactured by cutting off pieces of an inch long from a bar of English iron, the common size of which was an inch and a half in breadth by half an inch in thickness. Now, neither the nankin nor the iron circulates, their places being taken by English copper coin and China cash. The gray shirting still holds its place, but its value is fallen, and lately it has ranged from 6_s._ to 8_s._ The Brunei government, to prevent the constant disputes that arose, made it a legal tender at 6_s._ 8_d._ Mexican dollars are now becoming plentiful. One other article is also much used as money, and that is brass guns. In buying and selling you constantly hear, “I will give so many pounds, or hundredweights, of gun-metal.”