ently a highway or postroad, worthy of
emulation in other lands, and planned by the Government, a veritable
blessing to man and beast.

[Illustration: _Designing sarongs in Batavia_]

We passed a comfortable night in Maos at the Government rest house,
Staats, and left at the early hour of 6 A.M. for a return journey to
Batavia. We found that when we reached a junction, our train diverged
over a new route, giving us a different outlook, not unlike our first
experience, but, it seemed, with finer mountain scenery. First we
climbed to an altitude of about twenty-two hundred feet; then gradually
descended, our objective point, Batavia, being at sea-level. Many of the
high mountains showed cultivation to the very top, while the plains with
their alternate groups of bamboo, cocoanut, and other palms, were green
with the new rice crop, the cultivation of this commodity being
different in Java from that in Burma. Great care is expended on the
culture of the rice, the tiny plants first being put in small wet
enclosures; then, when sufficiently developed, they are planted
separately by the small army of workers, in receptacles made for them,
and set with the greatest regularity. The workers consist usually of
women or young girls, and the varied colors of their dress--or
undress--presented a marked feature. We also saw more coffee cultivated
than on any previous route, and it is to be regretted that the blight of
ten years ago has taken this old form of industry from the Javanese.
Strange as it may seem, we had no Java coffee in Java, the land of the
celebrated brand; nor did we see anything but a very strong extract of
coffee (to which was added a large quantity of milk), good and
convenient, no doubt, but not at all like the real article.

We arrived in Batavia during the afternoon; the hotel wore a homelike
air, and we passed a restful twenty-four hours with only a drive as the
regular programme. I have already treated of the marked natural
advantages of Java, and of the temples; too much cannot be said of this
"Garden of the East," with its varied landscape of alternating mountains
and plains, its wealth of trees in myriad forms, its shrubs which in
their luxuriance seem tree-like, and its tangle of vines and blossoming
flowers. But it appeared to me as if this holiday side of nature and the
workaday aspect of the life in Java did not harmonize, and I wondered if
this condition was caused by Dutch thrift being grafted on to