Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop

“ I cannot elicit anything very definite, here or elsewhere, about the legal system under which criminals are tried in these States. Apparently, murder, robbery, forgery, and violent assault come under English criminal law, and must be equally punishable whether committed by a Briton, a Chinaman, or a Malay. But then nobody, except a Christian, can be punished for bigamy. So criminal law even undergoes modification by local custom ”

“ The swellings from the bites have become confluent, and are scarlet with inflammation. It is truly humiliating that "the crown of things" cannot defend himself against these minute enemies, and should be made as miserable as I am just now.
But it is a most healthy climate, and when I write of mosquitoes, land leeches, centipedes and snakes, I have said my say as to its evils. ”

“ It is most abundant in January, February and March, and at the change of the monsoon, and there is enough all the year round to keep vegetation in beauty. Here, on uninteresting cleared land with a featureless foreground and level mangrove swamps for the middle distance, it must be terribly monotonous to have no change of seasons, no hope of the mercury falling below 80 degrees in the daytime, or of a bracing wind, or of any marked climatic changes for better or worse all life through. ”