place. We have no houses, and we dare not light a fire lest the smoke
draw our enemies upon us."

Running along the whole northern coast of Borneo, eight hundred miles,
and inland perhaps two hundred, is found Borneo Proper, one of the three
great Mohammedan kingdoms into which the island was divided as early as
the sixteenth century. This state is governed, or rather misgoverned, by
a sultan, and, under him, by rajahs and pangerans,--officials who give
to the commands of their nominal superior but a scanty obedience. For
two centuries Borneo Proper has been steadily settling into anarchy and
barbarism. With a government both feeble and despotic, it was torn by
intestine wars, crushed within by oppression and ravaged without by
piracy, until commerce and agriculture, the twin pillars of the state,
were equally threatened, and not one element of ruin seemed to be
wanting. What evidence of decay could be more striking than the simple
fact that Bruni, its capital, which in the sixteenth century was crowded
with a population of more than two hundred thousand souls, had in 1840
scarcely fourteen thousand inhabitants?

* * * * *

To one corner of this wasting empire came, twenty-five years ago, a
young Englishman. Simply a gentleman, he had no governmental alliances
to help him, and no advantages of any sort for founding empire, except
such as sprang from the possession of a sagacious mind, an undaunted
temper, and a heart thoroughly in sympathy with the oppressed. Alone he
has built up a flourishing state, introducing commercial activity and
the habits of civilized life where only oppression and misery were, and
has achieved an enterprise which seems to belong rather to the days of
chivalry than to a plodding, utilitarian age,--an enterprise which, in