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Beyond, and back from the Square, is Tanglin, or the suburbs, where the government officials and the heads of these great firms live in luxurious bungalows, surrounded by a swarm of retainers.

Let us drive from Raffles Square through this cosmopolitan city and out to Tanglin. Beginning at Cavanagh Bridge, at one end of which stands the great Singapore Club and the Post Office, is the ocean esplanade,–the pride of the city. It encloses a public playground of some fifteen acres, reclaimed from the sea at an expense of over two hundred thousand dollars. Every afternoon when the heat of the day has fallen from 150 deg. to 80 deg., the European population meets on this esplanade park to play tennis, cricket, and football, and to promenade, gossip, and listen to the music of the regimental or man-of-war band.

The drive from the sea, up Orchard Road to the Botanic Gardens, carries you by all the diversified life of the city. The Chinese restaurant is omnipresent. By its side sits a naked little bit of bronze, with a basket of sugar-cane–each stick, two feet long, cleaned and scraped, ready for the hungry and thirsty rickshaw coolies, who have a few quarter cents with which to gratify their appetites. On every veranda and in every shady corner are the Kling and Chinese barbers. They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs out of your nose and ears.

There is no special quarter for separate trades. Madras tailor shops rub shoulders with Malay blacksmith shops, while Indian wash-houses join Manila cigar manufactories.

Once past the commercial part of the ride, the great bungalows of the European and Chinese merchants come into view. The immediate borders of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals there is a wide gap in the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every such entrance there are posts of masonry, and a plate bearing the name of the manor and its owner.

At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns meet your eye.

Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned Malay kebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are passing silently among the guests with trays of eatables.

Dozens of gharries dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.

A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malay syce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation, dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.

Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. The syce springs down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,–pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,–urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shaded road. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”–we children pronounce it “Dom-i-stick,”–how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.