Datu Isa had great faith in a bangle I possessed, made of a kind of black seaweed found on the Sarawak coast, and she was anxious I should take care not to break it. It was given me in this way: During the first years of my stay in Sarawak, an old gardener employed at the Palace, having in some way misbehaved himself, was dismissed. Shortly afterwards, I met the old man in a state of great depression during one of my walks the other side of the river, and he begged me to use my influence with the Rajah and get him taken back again, promising he would behave better in the future. He was a lazy old man, but as I felt sorry for him, I asked the Rajah to give him another trial. The Rajah agreed, and the man resumed work in the Astana garden in his own desultory way. I often used to watch him pulling up the weeds from the paths; he would sit on his haunches, stare at the river, and take some minutes’ rest after every weed he extracted. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, he was a grateful soul, and on the morning of his reinstalment amongst the Rajah’s gardeners he brought me a bangle made of this black seaweed. It was very small and I had difficulty in getting it over my hand, so the old man put it into boiling water to make it more elastic, and, after some little trouble, it was forced over my hand. “Lightning, snake bites, and antus can never harm you,” he said, “as long as you keep the bangle round your wrist, but should it ever break, it would bring you bad luck!” The bangle is on my wrist now, and I dread lest anything should happen to it, for should it ever get broken, I should feel just as nervous of the result as would any of my Malay women friends. Some of the Malays in Sarawak use somewhat disconcerting methods to frighten away evil spirits on the occasion of very bad storms. After a frightful gale, accompanied by incessant lightning and thunder, that occurred in Kuching, two or three owners of plantations in the suburbs of the town came to the Rajah and complained that some of their Malay neighbours had cut down all their fruit trees during the hurricane, in order to propitiate the spirit of the storm. Nowadays these drastic measures to other people’s property are seldom heard of, because the Rajah has his own methods of dealing with such superstitious and undesirable proceedings. It took some time to eradicate these curious and unneighbourly customs, but I believe they are now a thing of the past. [Illustration: INCHI BAKAR--SCHOOL MASTER, KUCHING]