merchandise. Raïssa is proud; proud of her mother's standing in her village; proud of her fine clothes, of the gold bracelets on her wrists, of the gold rings in her ears, while everybody knows that at home she keeps even more golden treasure, to be admired at every feast, — gold pins to keep her hair smooth and a gold diadem, the envy of all her friends. Raïssa is a girl of consequence and proud of it indeed, very proud, but most proud in the affection of Roostam, surnamed the Game-Cock.

Roostam, a dare-devil sort of a young fellow, did not get that nickname for nothing. Apart from his natural proclivity to cock-fighting as a Sumatran Malay and, more particularly, as a scion of the family which has held the record for the raising of game-fowl in the whole country from time immemorial, his maternal uncle, Haji Yusoof, being the greatest authority on everything connected with the sport, far and near in the Highlands and in the Lowlands too, Roostam himself is the veriest game-cock among men. Though generous and kindhearted, his friends and acquaintances know him to be quick at taking offence. He does not suffer any one to slight his interests or, worse still, his pretensions. He is a free-born man, a stickler for the Malay code of etiquette; his young, hot blood rebels against even the thought of compromise; his kris lives next door to his ire.

When the old women of the village found out that a match between Roostam and Raïssa was a foregone conclusion, they warned their daughters and grand-daughters against him with all their might, calling him a scapegrace, a dangerous wild bull in the herd, who sooner or later would get himself and all his kin into trouble, and the girls assented with faces suggestive of sour grapes for secretly they admired Roostam as the flower of chivalry and manly excellence, and they hated Raïssa, whose success with him exasperated them. The old men, too, thinking of their own youth or what they made themselves believe that their own youth had been, cherished Roostam's exploits in their hearts and yarned about the vigor of past ages revived in his person.

Especially Haji Yusoof, who had travelled, improving his knowledge by the pilgrimage to Mecca, and through that feat, together with his unequalled experience in the matter of game-fowl, had become a personage of influence, extended his protection to Roostam, as indeed he should, being the lad's maternal uncle. The fundamental principle of all social institutions on the West Coast of Sumatra is the succession by inheritance according to the rules of a strict matrilineal descent. The Malay family, in the narrower sense of the word, consists there of the mother with her offspring. The father does not belong to it; his relationship to his brothers and sisters is of far more consequence than his relationship to his wife and children. And since he is not a member

of the social group they constitute, he cannot be its head. The duties and privileges attached to that position devolve upon the eldest brother of his wife, the eldest maternal uncle of his children, called their mammak.

On her way to Pasar Lawang, Raïssa passes a trail which leads her through a coffee-plantation to the place where she knows that a cockfight is on. True, the Government has prohibited that kind of sport, but then Sumatra is, like the rest of the Dutch East Indies, a country of ordinances not enforced and regulations not attended to. Wherever the police raise a cry about cock-fighting, something more lies behind it than the cock-fighting itself, — a native vendetta or a native quarrel of some sort, or simply a native desire to worry the Dutch officials. Since, however, the written law must be respected, at any rate by the minions of the law, if not in fact at least in outward appearance, the cock-fights are removed from the market-places to more secluded nooks and corners, an arrangement quite satisfactory to the said minions, who indulge in the national pastime without further reserve, as every one else does, and engage their game-fowls to be pitted either by their own hands or by proxy. So it happened in the case of a native police-officer, by common consent called murei, which is the name of a bird with an unmelodious, unpleasant squeak. The nickname was aptly bestowed as Malay nicknames always are. A stranger in the land, a man from Bencoolen, thrown upon the country by the influence of an official who put him on the police force in consideration of personal services, Murei had established his reputation as a sneak, not to be trusted on any account and a braggart withal. He found pleasure in lifting his voice against the breed of game-fowls that were the glory of Roostam and Roostam's mammak, Haji Yusoof. The battle now in progress was planned to cure him of his pluming himself as the possessor of a cock, brought all the way from Padang, which, he boasted, could kill in single combat all the game-cocks between the lake of Maninju and the lake of Singkarah. This morning that valorous bird was to step forward against Roostam's favorite.

Feeling much interested, Raïssa has eagerly watched the preparation for the odd fights that are to follow the main as far as gamefowls from Matoor may take part. She has witnessed the infinite care bestowed on the separation of the fat cocks from the middling and the middling from the lean before their being cooped and, after the necessary purging of the fat ones, before their being put to their diet. She has followed the sparring exercises, the providing of the spears with muffs, the minute, periodical examination of the feathers, the beak, the eyes, to see if the fowls are in good health. And then, three days before the battle, at the auspicious hour set for the removal

of the fighters to the scene of their future great deeds, she attended the last probing of their temper and listened to the animated debates, the endless discussions as to whether they were game or not and which one was most game and how the chances stood, and so forth, and so forth.

Meanwhile Roostam had trained his cock with the utmost assiduity under the guidance of his mammak, Haji Yusoof. All that time of anxious care he hardly allowed Raïssa to come near him; but as it concerned a matter of so much moment, she bore him no ill will for being neglected. Sharing his enthusiasm she resigned herself and her unescorted walk to Pasar Lawang, inconsistent with the habitual reserve of a maiden of her rank and station, has no other purpose than to learn the issue of the battle immediately after its having been fought for, surely, the very first thing its promoters will do is to send word to the market-place where the itinerant tradesmen are awaiting the news to spread it through the whole district as far as Bukit Tinggi. It would be a calamity indeed if a game-cock of Haji Yusoof's breed, in Roostam's hands, lost against a Padang cock in the hands of a man from Bencoolen, and Murei at that. Raïssa's excitement running higher and higher, her expectations are, however, of the very best.

Hearing steps behind her and some one calling her by her name, she turns round to see Roostam's mammak coming up, extremely venerable in his regulation dress of a haji,' with a tuft of sparse white hair under his chin. He reads the question in her eyes and tells her that, at the time he left the pit, they were still at the preliminaries. Raïssa thinks it strange that Roostam's mammak has not waited for the end; yet she ventures no direct inquiry. But soon she understands that something is amiss, when informed of Murei's determination to stay away himself and be represented by one of his underlings. Haji Yusoof does not say so but Raïssa feels that he suspects foul play and, being of the elect, declines to get mixed up in the affray which is likely to follow. Haji Yusoof holds an office of responsibility as the chief of the kampong Lawang and, therefore, though of all cock-fights his heart goes out to this special one, he deems it desirable, with a view to possible consequences of possible happenings, that he be able to say: I was not in it.

Solicitous to please Roostam's mammak as women, brown or white, are always eager to please whenever it can further some ultimate. purpose, Raïssa lets Haji Yusoof pass before her and walks behind him to Pasar Lawang.

The venerable-looking Haji Yusoof is a great talker as indeed all Sumatra Malays are, but now he keeps silent and, having reached his

1 One who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

dwelling, where he bids Raïssa enter with him for a chat with his womenfolk, he goes straight up to where his ketitiran hangs in its cage, suspended from a roof-beam, and takes it down, putting it beside him. The natives are very fond of pigeons, in particular of some kinds that live wild in the woods, as the ketitiran and the punei, which are caught and tamed and then become the constant companions of their owners. Haji Yusoof's ketitiran is a famous one, reputed to bring extraordinary luck. As a matter of fact, Haji Yusoof prospers exceedingly in a worldly sense, harvesting from many rice-fields.

Very soon quite a number of callers drop in, anxious to hear about the cock-fight which, for some reason or other, they are not able to attend; anxious also to let their own fowl profit by Haji Yusoof's advice. They have made it a habit on Monday, the market day at Kampong Lawang, to consult Haji Yusoof in that way when visiting the pasar for their weekly purchases. People travel even from Bukit Tinggi and Padang Panjang, yea, from Bua and Solok, to avail themselves of his skill in dealing with the maladies and disorders that fowl, especially game-fowl, are heir to.

On the main battle, now raging between the cocks of Roostam and his opponent, Haji Yusoof has not much to say, and his visitors perceive very soon that the subject is better dismissed in his presence. But he readily imparts his superior wisdom in the treatment of such ailments among poultry as indigestion, costiveness, diarrhoea, fever, asthma, gout, consumption, inflammation of the eye, obstruction of the nostrils, melancholy or moping, rheumatism or lifts, with useful hints about moulting, loss of feathers, vermin, etc., thrown in. A man from Bua has brought with him an old rheumatic rooster and the younger females of Haji Yusoof's household derive great amusement from the spectacle of this bird, once a game-cock of some renown, strutting round, lifting its legs high and putting them down with care, stiff in limbs and joints, as if it were marching to the sound of the solemn march sometimes heard at Bukit Tinggi when the soldiers, in garrison at Fort de Kock, turn out for a military funeral.

After treating this patient, Haji Yusoof examines the sick-looking eyes, nostrils and mouth of a hen with ruffled feathers, that is suffering from roup, breathing laboriously, and he advises to give her plenty of fresh air, to grease her swollen head every morning before sunrise, to hide her from the moon. Thereupon a bad case of pip claims his attention and he warns against unclean food and muddy water, and prescribes a dose of pepper, administered with coconut-oil or, if that proves insufficient, the cutting off, as a last resort, of the tip of the tongue. Almost forgetting the cock-fight in his endeavors to sustain his reputation as a breeder and physician of poultry, he expatiates upon a remedy against the gapes, somewhat heroic but recommended by long experience. . . .

Raïssa, impatient to learn the result of the battle, slips out to the pasar proper (i.e., the place where the pakan or market is held), cunningly calculating that, as soon as anything positive becomes. known, it will be proclaimed there first of all. Picking her way to the enclosure of peace, a spot marked off by flat stones standing on end, where formerly the elders used to meet in council and to preside over the bull-fights, cock-fights and other such amusements before the Government stepped in to forbid them, - picking her way between the little booths whose owners deal in the produce of the land and articles of daily use in Malay households, she meets many acquaintances, mostly old women for the reason already referred to. If anything, the marriageable girls of the Padang Highlands are even more shy about showing themselves in public than those of other Malay lands. Little girls, however, run about in plenty and several of them, children of poor mothers who squat at the roadside with the fruit of their gardens for sale, offer kopi daoen to the thirsty, a concoction of the leaves of the coffee-shrub. Too poor to drink real coffee while tending the richest of coffee-plantations, they have to leave the berries and beans alone after picking them for export oversea.

Raïssa does not worry about such things when she finds herself in the pasar, which is no less a delight to the native fair ones than are the pretentious shops of Rijswijk and Noordwijk at Batavia to their sisters of the ruling race. Raïssa worries about Roostam, the GameCock, though, for all that, she cannot help admiring the printed cotton goods temptingly displayed by merchants from Padang, trashy stuff, imported from Europe as a cheap substitute for the fine but expensive bajus and sarongs and slendangs of silk and gold lace, the pride of the Highland damsels in days of yore, finery altogether out of the financial reach of the present generation, save of a few who carry them as heirlooms.

A few strangers stroll about, their respective habitats being indicated by their raiment in a country where, if not the material, at least the cut, with purely local variations, has remained stationary from the time when Parapatih Sabateng of Body Chiniago and Kiahy Tumanggangan of Kota Pilihan, in the picturesque valley of Priangan Padang Panjang, laid the foundation of the Malay institutions as they continue up to this day, notwithstanding sharp conflicts between western innovations and the hadat, the ancient, unwritten law. The men of Agam, who frown at the naked legs of their brethren that hail from the XIII Kotas, can be recognized by their long inexpressibles, and Raïssa notices even one or two visitors in Acheh-trousers, very wide and loose from the hips down. They make her think of a fellow who lately has courted Roostam's company, at night for he avoids the light of day, gossip marking him as a deserter from the Dutch army in close