race and the more civilised people. They
occupy the whole of the Malay Peninsula, save
where a few wandering Negritos claim precarious
subsistence and temporary lodging. They
have half Sumatra and all the sea-coast of
Borneo, and are computed to be about a million
and a half strong in Borneo, a quarter of a
million in the Malay Peninsula, and about
a million in Sumatra. They are a short
squat people, with round faces, wide mouths,
high cheek bones, short small noses, black,
small, deep-seated eyes. Their hair is lank,
black, and harsh, and they have little or no beard.
The Sâmangs are a dwarfed, low-class negro
race. The Negritos or Aetas of the Philippines
are also short, but well made and active, the
nose a little less flattened, soft frizzled hair, a
skin less dark, and features more regular than
those of the African negro. The Spanish
expression is "less black and less ugly." The
Papuas of New Guinea are also true negroes,
and are the most respectable of all the woolly-
haired race, having made some advances in
civilisation, though still below the aboriginal
inhabitants of Borneo. The Negro-Malays seem to
hold an intermediate place between the Malays
and the Papuas, being darker than the former
and fairer than the latter, with frizzled hair
growing all over the head, not in separate tufts,
and with more the appearance of South Sea
Islanders than of either the negroes or the
Malays. Perhaps they are the next step to the
Polynesians. Nature seems to go by strangely
definite stages of progression, and as in New
Guinea we come to the first expression of the
marsupials, the pouched animals so eminently
characteristic of Australia and New Zealand,
so in the Negro-Malays Nature may have
been trying her " 'prentice hand " on a new
combination of atoms, something different from
her Malayan sons and yet not quite like her
negro offspring—a transition race, in fact—to
see what kind of creatures the new pattern
would make.

A PRINCE'S HOLIDAY.

I. A STEEPLE-CHASE.

HAVING seen the gayest of processions flash
by, and having roared ourselves hoarse in shouting
at—that is welcoming—the interesting
young pair who have come to see a certain green
island, we go to rest, and are up in time to rush
down to the steeple-chase—Irish Derby—twenty
miles away. This is a very happy shape of
entertainment to welcome noble guests to the land of
Charles O'Malley and of the great strong horses
which cross country and take five-barred gates,
and "top" walls with ease and enjoyment.
Others have the conventional "laying the first
stone," and Stubbly Volunteer's review, with the
Stubbly ball in the evening; we offer the wares
in which we are strongest, and in which we
have some little credit. We are, besides, to
have a week of galas, special of their kind, and
an Installation, that is to be as sumptuously
theatrical, in its way, as a little coronation.
Such is the fancy of our nation. We like any
verging on dresses and decorations—we would
not part with our court for the world.

To get down to the steeple-chase—Punchestown!
a name inviting to both rider and
horses—is a matter of almost appalling
difficulty. To find a large railway terminus wholly
given up to a crushing, shouting mob,
frantically fighting for tickets, and taking them
up in the air, clutching a partition which has
been scaled; with ladies screaming and fainting,
and betting roughs fighting, seems scarcely
promising of entertainment. But the rush for
trains is yet worse; and it is not a little
dispiriting, though amusing enough for the
non-combatant, to see train after train pass
away slowly, every compartment packed closely,
with people standing, sitting, and lying on
each other; luggage vans, horse boxes, all
packed in the same herring fashion, so much
so that the lid of the cask cannot be made to
shut them in tight—and they go off with doors
flapping. Someone at last turning frantic at
being left behind seven or eight times, and
thinking it highly probable that he will be
thus abandoned seven or eight times more,
climbs to the roof, an example speedily
followed, and thus by so happy a device a double
freight is secured. As this heavy load trails
away out of the station, it seems transformed
into a mass of grinning, chattering faces,
actually enjoying their cribbed and cabined
situation, and shrieking and hooping with delight.
Perhaps the sense of their own private discomfort,
which will presently be horrible, is
overborne by the delight of contemplating the lines
of rueful faces left on the desert island, gazing
with a miserable despondency, while the others
glide away triumphant. Those hanging on behind,
standing on the buffers, shout and yell with
delight, while a few, grown frantic at the
spectacle, take a leap, harlequin-like, and shoot
bodily through the open window, and arrive
headforemost in the packed mass within, who,
willing to cast them out, are yet afraid to do so
from the danger. Separate engines are out on
their own responsibility; some crowded with
smiling ladies, all tulle and bournous, in the hope
of "picking up a train" somewhere along the line,
while a gallant militaire or two, in all the glory
of veils and speckless dust coats, is actually
lying on the great pile of coals heaped in
the tender. In fact the whole line near the
station is given up to the populace, who swarm
and surge, and go off in great masses to meet
and carry by escalade the returning empty
trains, which thus always arrive laden, and with
swarms of human ants clinging to the steps and
windows.

At last all the world has got down. Here
is the course, said to be the prettiest one of
the breakneck order in the kingdom; for nature
and art have happily combined to furnish it
with all the known choice morsels of danger,
en masse as it were, and which, to other places,
are distributed with but a niggard hand. The