In the busy haunts of men in the West you are awakened in the morning by the tooting of the motor horns, the clanging of tramway bells or the rattle of the milkman's pails. In Kuling you awake (that 3s if you are not an early riser) to the sound of hymns. If you live in one of the more thickly populated parts of the valley, you find yourself in a maelstrom of psalmody, on all sides the tunes impinge against your tympana, you are in the centre of a contest among types and eras of hymnology. Bernard of Clairvaux competes with Martin Luther and Charles Wesley struggles with Moody and Sankey. Kuling begins the day with praise and the spirit is in Kuling with the col fresh morning breeze in this quiet restful valley.
But Kuling too is wonderfully human. It loves a bit of gossip and the area about the estate office and the tennis courts is its equivalent to the village: green of the homeland. On the seats above the courts one comes across friends and acquaintances that one has not seen perhaps for years and many and voluminous are the notes to be compared, while the bench beside the estate office is usually occupied of an evening by a few of the elders of the community burning tobacco and retailing gossip or it may be a group of their wives discussing dress and that unending theme, the squeezes of the cook. In times of trouble or excitement in China it is usually to this region that rumours of all sorts may be traced. North stands in the same re-Jationship to rumours as Yap and Suan do to typhoons.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.