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 A DAUGHTER OF THE MUHAMMADANS

HE sunset hour had come as I passed up the narrow track that skirted the river bank, with a mob of villagers at my heels. Old men were there who had seen many strange things in the wild days before the coming of the white men; lull peasants, who seemed too stolid and stupid to have ever seen anything at all; and swaggering youngsters, grown learned in the mysteries of reading and writing, fresh from our schools and prepared at a moment's notice to teach the wisest of the village elders the only proper manner in which an egg may be sucked. The rabble which every Malay village spews up nowadays, when one chances to visit it, is usually composed of these elements—the old men whose wisdom is their own and of its kind deep and wide; the middle-aged tillers of the soil, whose lives are set in so straitened a rut that they cannot peep over the edges, and whose wisdom is that of the field and the forest; and the men of the younger generation, most of whose knowledge is borrowed, extraordinarily imperfect of its kind, and fortified by the self-confidence of ignorance. The men of the first two classes are gradually dying out, those of the last are replacing them; and the result sometimes tempts one to ask the heretical question whether European