And first the boats—yes, the boats. There are no more characteristic things of a people than their water vehicles. The enormous “Himalaya” steamship is the card that Great Britain sends out upon the ocean; the magnificent clipper-ships of our own America, as they ride at anchor in the “gorgeous East,” or the world over, as impatient steeds to break their tether, not in comparison, but outstripping by contrast far the naval architecture of any other people, do not evince the onward and upward march of the United States, more fully than does the stupid, cumbersome, unsightly junk, show the _inertia_ of the opinionated Mongolian. The Malay boats around the ship soon after we arrived, were most symmetrical in proportion, and pretty to look at. They are “dug-outs,” rather crank, but beautifully and sharply modelled. The song of the native rowers is quite strange, and far from unpleasing. The man who sits behind you in the sharp stern, steering with a paddle, pitches his voice, and gives the key-note of the “barbaric pearl” ditty (that is, I supposed, it must have been something about barbaric pearls), goes on with the burden, and the two rowers amidships, rather indifferent to the fact that the unsteadiness of their boat does not suit you, musically chorus, “A—lah! A—lah! El—lel—la!” Their larger boats called prahus, with their graceful latine sails, move with great rapidity through the water, and are said to be as elegantly modelled as any yacht “America.” Indeed, some are of the opinion that the fast modern pleasure-boat, owes its origin to the prahus of the Malay. Thackeray, in his “Cornhill to Cairo,” has most pleasantly and truly described the keen relish which is afforded to travel if one could be taken up, and suddenly translated—or immersed as it were—among a people entirely different in complexion, habit, and costume, from his own. Unfortunately you are deprived of this in the East; your arrival at one place is continually anticipating another; and so at Singapore, most unwillingly, you get too large a slice of the picture, too much foretaste of the grand “central,” “celestial,” “flowery,” “middle kingdom,” though in a few days’ run of China. The first thing that met our gaze, laying in shore of us, their unsightly masts unshipped, their large sails under cover, their high stems and decks in the shadow of mats and bamboo, waiting for a change of the monsoon that they might go back to Quangtung or Fungching, were moored the ungainly Chinese junks. Of course, as is invariably the case, even on their smaller boats, from either side of the square bow peers the big painted eye; and if the stranger should be curious enough to inquire why they are put there, the matter-of-fact Chinaman, with a “Hy-yah,”—more expressive than the shoulder shrug of the Frenchman—would make answer, “No hab eye, how can see?”