nothing should be forgotten, nothing should--"

The sense of the unwonted solitude grew upon him suddenly, and in the
unusual silence he caught himself longing even for the usually unwelcome
sound of his wife's voice to break the oppressive stillness which seemed,
to his frightened fancy, to portend the advent of some new misfortune.
"What has happened?" he muttered half aloud, as he shuffled in his
imperfectly adjusted slippers towards the balustrade of the verandah. "Is
everybody asleep or dead?"

The settlement was alive and very much awake. It was awake ever since
the early break of day, when Mahmat Banjer, in a fit of unheard-of
energy, arose and, taking up his hatchet, stepped over the sleeping forms
of his two wives and walked shivering to the water's edge to make sure
that the new house he was building had not floated away during the night.

The house was being built by the enterprising Mahmat on a large raft, and
he had securely moored it just inside the muddy point of land at the
junction of the two branches of the Pantai so as to be out of the way of
drifting logs that would no doubt strand on the point during the freshet.
Mahmat walked through the wet grass saying bourrouh, and cursing softly
to himself the hard necessities of active life that drove him from his
warm couch into the cold of the morning. A glance showed him that his
house was still there, and he congratulated himself on his foresight in
hauling it out of harm's way, for the increasing light showed him a
confused wrack of drift-logs, half-stranded on the muddy flat,
interlocked into a shapeless raft by their branches, tossing to and fro
and grinding together in the eddy caused by the meeting currents of the
two branches of the river. Mahmat walked down to the water's edge to
examine the rattan moorings of his house just as the sun cleared the