As half of our beaters were Mohammedans and so forbidden to touch pork, the burden of carrying our pigs the six miles through lallang grass, jungle and swamp land, came hard on our Brahmists. We knew that the only way to make them work was to call them "Sons of dogs" and walk off and leave them with a parting injunction to "get in by the time we did if they wanted their wages."
This we did without deigning to notice their pathetic gestures, heart-rending appeals and protestations to the "Sons of the Heaven-Born" that they could not lift one hundredth part of such burdens.
Tunku Ibrahim was just past seventeen when his father, the Sultan Abubaker, chose to recognize him as his heir and Crown Prince of Johore.
From the day when the little prince had been deemed old enough to leave his mother and the women's palace until the day he had entered the native artillery as a lieutenant, he had been schooled and trained by the English missionaries and the Tuan Kadi, or Mohammedan high priest, as becomes a son of so illustrious a father.
Tunku Ibrahim had made one trip to England when he was fifteen years old, and with his little cousin, the Tunku, or Prince, Othman, had dined with the Queen at Windsor.
So, when the Sultan returned from a long stay at Carlsbad and found that the Sultana was dead and that Ibrahim had shot up into a man, he said:--
"I am getting to be an old man and may die at any time. I will call all my nobles and people to the palace, and they shall see me place the crown on Ibrahim's head. Then if I die, he will rule, and the British will not take his country from him as long as he is wise and kingly."
Whereupon his Highness sent out invitations to the Governor and all the foreign consuls in Singapore to be his guests and witness the crowning of his son.
We started in quaint little box-like carriages, called gharries, long before the fierce Malayan sun had risen above the palms, accomplishing the fourteen miles across the beautiful island in little over an hour.
The diminutive Deli ponies, not larger than Newfoundland dogs, broke into a run the moment we closed the lattice doors, and it was all their half-naked drivers could do to keep their perches on the swaying shafts.