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CHINESE JUNK AT SINGAPORE.

Singapore has a frontage of three miles, and has fine Government buildings, court-house, town-hall, clubs, institutes, masonic lodge, theatre, and the grandest English cathedral in Asia—that of St. Andrew’s. In Commercial Square, the business centre of Singapore, all nationalities seem to be represented. Here, too, are the Kling gharry-drivers, having active little ponies and neat conveyances. Jack ashore will be pestered with their applications. “These Klings,” says Mr. Thomson, “seldom, if ever, resort to blows; but their language leaves nothing for the most vindictive spirit to desire. Once, at one of the landing-places, I observed a British tar come ashore for a holiday. He was forthwith beset by a group of Kling gharry-drivers, and, finding that the strongest of British words were as nothing when pitted against the Kling vocabulary, and that no half-dozen of them would stand up like men against his huge iron fists, he seized the nearest man, and hurled him into the sea. It was the most harmless way of disposing of his enemy, who swam to a boat, and it left Jack in undisturbed and immediate possession of the field.” The naval officer will find excellent deer-hunting and wild-hog shooting to be had near the city, and tiger-hunting at a distance. Tigers, indeed, were formerly terribly destructive of native life on the island; it was said that a man per diem was sacrificed. Now, cases are more rare. For good living, Singapore can hardly be beaten; fruit in particular is abundant and cheap. Pine-apples, cocoa-nuts, bananas of thirty varieties, mangoes, custard-apples, and oranges, with many commoner fruits, abound. Then there is the mangosteen, the delicious “apple of the East,” thought by many to surpass any fruit in the world, and the durian, a fruit as big as a boy’s head, with seeds as big as walnuts enclosed in a pulpy, fruity custard. The taste for this fruit is an acquired one, and is impossible to describe, while the smell is most disgusting. So great is the longing for it, when once the taste is acquired, that the highest prices are freely offered for it, particularly by some of the rich natives. A former King of Ava spent enormous sums over it, and could hardly then satisfy his rapacious appetite. A succeeding monarch kept a special steamer at Rangoon, and when the supplies came into the city it was loaded up, and dispatched at once to the capital—500 miles up a river. The smell of the durian is so unpleasant that the fruit is never seen on the tables of the merchants or planters; it is eaten slily in corners, and out of doors.