QUAIL-FIGHTING.

In some places they match quails, in the manner of cocks.  These fight with great inveteracy, and endeavour to seize each other by the tongue.  The Achinese bring also into combat the dial-bird (murei) which resembles a small magpie, but has an agreeable though imperfect note.  They sometimes engage one another on the wing, and drop to the ground in the struggle.

FENCING.

They have other diversions of a more innocent nature.  Matches of fencing, or a species of tournament, are exhibited on particular days; as at the breaking up of their annual fast, or month of ramadan, called there the puasa.  On these occasions they practise strange attitudes, with violent contortions of the body, and often work themselves up to a degree of frenzy, when the old men step in and carry them off.  These exercises in some circumstances resemble the idea which the ancients have given us of the pyrrhic or war dance; the combatants moving at a distance from each other in cadence, and making many turns and springs unnecessary in the representation of a real combat.  This entertainment is more common among the Malays than in the country.  The chief weapons of offence used by these people are the kujur or lance and the kris.  This last is properly Malayan, but in all parts of the island they have a weapon equivalent, though in general less curious in its structure, wanting that waving in the blade for which the kris is remarkable, and approaching nearer to daggers or knives.

Among their exercises we never observe jumping or running.  They smile at the Europeans, who in their excursions take so many unnecessary leaps.  The custom of going barefoot may be a principal impediment to this practice in a country overrun with thorny shrubs, and where no fences occur to render it a matter of expediency.

DIVERSION OF TOSSING A BALL.

They have a diversion similar to that described by Homer as practised among the Phaeacians, which consists in tossing an elastic wicker ball or round basket of split rattans into the air, and from one player to another, in a peculiar manner.  This game is called by the Malays sipak raga, or, in the dialect of Bencoolen, chipak rago, and is played by a large party standing in an extended circle, who endeavour to keep up the ball by striking it either perpendicularly, in order to receive it again, or obliquely to some other person of the company, with the foot or the hand, the heel or the toe, the knee, the shoulder, the head, or with any other part of the body; the merit appearing to consist in producing the effect in the least obvious or most whimsical manner; and in this sport many of them attain an extraordinary degree of expertness.  Among the plates of Lord Macartney’s Embassy will be found the representation of a similar game, as practised by the natives of Cochin-china.

SMOKING OF OPIUM.