AMONG THE FISHER FOLK
A palm-leaf sail that stretches wide,
A sea that's running strong,
A boat that dips its laving side,
The forefoot's rippling song.
A flaming sky, a crimson flood,
Here's joy for body and mind,
As in our canting crafts we scud
With a spanking breeze behind.The Song of the Fisher Folk.This is a land of a thousand beauties. Nature, as we see her in the material things
which delight our eyes, is straight from the hand of God, unmarred by man's
deforming, a marvellous creation of green growths and brilliant shades of colour,
fresh, sweet, pure, an endless panorama of loveliness. But it is not only the
material things which form the chief beauties of the land in which we dwell. The
ever-varying lights of the Peninsula, and the splendid Malayan sky that arches
over us are, in themselves, at once the crown of our glory, and the imparters of a
fresh and changeful loveliness to the splendours of the earth. Our eyes are ever
glutted with the wonders of the sky, and of the lights which are shed around us.
From the moment when the dawn begins to paint its orange tints in the dim East,
and later floods the vastness of the low-lying clouds with glorious dyes of purple
and vermillion, and a hundred shades of colour, for which we have no name,
reaching to the very summit of the heavens; on through the early morning hours,
when the slanting rays of the sun throw long broad streaks of dazzlingly white
light upon the waters of sea and river; on through the burning noonday, when the
shadows fall black and sharp and circular, in dwarfed patches about our feet; on
through the cooler hours of the afternoon, when the sun is a burning disc low
down in the western sky, or, hiding behind a bank of clouds, throws wide-
stretched arms of prismatic colour high up into the heavens; on through the hour
of sunset, when all the world is a flaming blaze of gold and crimson; and so into
the cool still night, when the moon floods us with a sea of light only one degree