Voon Yen Knoon deserved a holiday, certainly, for he worked hard among his countrymen, besides teaching every day in the school. Three evenings every week were devoted to the instruction of the Chinese, at the mission-house. Two distinct languages were spoken by the different tribes of Chinese who had settled at Sarawak. They could not be taught together. The people of the Kay tribe came on one evening, the Hokien another, each having their own interpreter. On the third evening the interpreters were instructed in the lessons for the following week. On these nights our long dining-room was full of Chinamen, and a large tray of tiny cups of tea was carried in, and consumed before the teaching began. CHAPTER XVIII. LAST YEARS AT SARAWAK. Mr. Chalmers' Merdang Dyaks once said to him, "See how many races of people there are: Dyaks, Malays, Klings, Chinese, English. They have all different religions: this is proper, for God has given to each the religion suited to them." I remembered this ingenious remark when I was reading Mr. Helms's interesting book, just published, "Pioneering in the Far East." He says: "Like most barbarous and savage nations, the Dyak identifies his gods and spirits with the great phenomena of nature, and assigns them abodes on the lofty mountains. Though, in his opinion, all spirits are not equally malignant, all are more or less to be dreaded. The silent surroundings of primaeval forests in which the Dyak spends most of his time, the mountains, the gloomy caves, often looming mysteriously through cloud and mist, predispose him to identify them with supernatural influences, which in his imagination take the form of monsters and genii. With no better guide than the untutored imagination of a mind which in religious matters is a blank, who shall wonder that this is so? I have myself often felt the influences of such surroundings, when dark clouds deepened the forest gloom, and the approaching storm set the trees whispering: if, at such a moment, the shaggy red-haired and goblin form of the orang-outang, with which some of the Dyaks identify their genii, should appear among the branches, it requires little imagination to people the mystic gloom with unearthly beings."