I am happy to say that Inchi Bakar is still living, and I often hear from him. Although he and I may be parted, sometimes for years together, the friendship that exists between us is as strong as it was in the early days of our acquaintance, when he was a young lad visiting me at the Astana with his mother and grandmother. Malays are faithful friends, nor does absence blunt their friendship. I derive great consolation from that fact, when, as often happens, a sort of home-sickness comes over me, and I feel as though I must take the next ship back to the land I love so well, never, never to leave it again. In those days Inchi Bakar’s wife was also included in our educational group. She was a relation of Datu Isa, and she and Daiang Sahada were friends. I should like to draw special attention to the part played by these two Malay ladies in the education of the women in Kuching, who were much impressed by their kind interest and sympathy. Those were pleasant days for us all, groping about the letters of the Arabic alphabet, and trying to obtain calligraphic perfection. After what we considered our hours of hard work, we thought recreation was necessary, so that on most days, as it got cooler and the sun began to sink behind Matang, we would go into the Astana garden in order to “eat the air,” as they said. Those walks in our garden were a great delight to them. They loved the roses, the jasmine, the honeysuckle, the tuberoses, and many other tropical plants which grew in beds on the closely mown lawns round our house. They often asked permission to take some of the flowers home, and their methods of picking the flowers were so refined, gentle, and economical, that they might pick as many as they liked without any devastation being noticeable in the beds after their passage. Malays never pick flowers with their stems; they only take the heads of flowers which they set floating in saucers filled with water. They used to ask me why we ordered our gardeners to break off great branches of blossoms to put in water in our drawing-room. “They are so high up,” they would say, “their perfume can never be thoroughly enjoyed. Besides it destroys the plant.” So that in my rooms I always had great basins full of sweet-smelling stemless flowers floating on the surface of the water to please my friends. If only we could free ourselves from the conventional ideas, we must realize it is entirely erroneous to imagine that in order to make a room beautiful we must decorate it with long stems of flowers and buds. I think Malays have much better taste in such matters, because flowers smell quite as sweet and last just as long under the methods they employ of perfuming their houses. [Illustration: DAIANG LEHUT--DAIANG SAHADA’S DAUGHTER]