MARGINAL COMMENTS
By E. L. WOODWARD
lump, fairly good to fine, the ton." I have seen Singapore. As a returned traveller I wish I could say that I had watched a dragon hunt ; that I had been appalled, sickened, thrilled, stupefied, by this supreme spectacle, this pastime of knights, saints, and heroes ; the most English of English sports. But I saw not the least sign of a dragon in Singapore. Only a lot of sedate people who knew to the last penny their neighbours' incomes ; a pier like a covered-in railway station with the most enchanting colours, every kind of bobbing boat, and every type of passenger, Malays, Chinamen, Japanese, Bengalis, Germans. Sikhs, Portuguese, Dutch, and three British staff officers. Never a dragon lashing the blue water. There is not even a stuffed dragon in Raffles Hotel.
By chance, on the very day after I had read this news- paper, I came upon a speech of Sir Robert Peel on anomalies of taxation in the 1830's. "If I walk with a bamboo cane, I pay at the rate of 5s. a 1,000, if with a rattan, 5s. a 1,000 ; if with a whangee, or a jumboo, or a dragon's blood, still 3s. a 1,000." I have not walked with a whangee or a jumbo°. I wish I had. I often find myself admitting that other people's arguments are put more neatly than my own, and yet I am sure, in my secret heart, that their ideas are wrong. If I had a whangee or a jumnboo, no one would ever catch me out ; why, I would just twirl the thing.
I go back to Singapore. A good many Singapovrians, seeing that I had not the hard-bitten planter's look, tried to sell me canes of sorts. Evidently, I am not in the dragon's blood class, even for the confidence trick. I confess I might have fallen to a dragon's blood, though prices are likely to have gone up since Sir Robert Peel's time. A tax of five .shillings on every thousand shillings' worth isn't much for congealed dragon's blood.
I keep a reference library of scientific works. I looked up dragons. My authority is a little old-fashioned, though there is much to be said for these older works, because scientific fashions have a way of going back on the latest theory. I quote Bartholomaeus Anglieus, who was once translated into four languages, and long survived the invention of printing. He says this about dragons : ". Between dragons and elephants is everlasting fighting, for the dragon with his tail bindeth and spanneth the elephant. . . . The cause why the dragon •desireth the elephant's blood is the coldness of the elephant's blood, whereby the dragon dcsireth to cool himself. Jerome saith, that the dragon is a full thirsty beast." This explains it all.
What a stick I might have bought. And yet that elephant among books, the Oxford Dictionary, will have it that dragon's blood .is " a bright red gum or resin, the exudation of the fruit of a palm ; formerly, the hispissated juice of the dragon tree."
Who ever heard of a walking stick made out of inspissated. . juice, boiled or reboiled ? Give me Bartholomaeus Anglicus. He was a scientist,
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