well-to-do natives were riding ponies. The distance was thirteen miles.
Tjiseroepan is a little village in the hills at the foot of the mountain
which it was proposed to ascend on the following day. The traveller was
received by the Assistant Wodena, a native official who had been riding
suspiciously behind and before the carriage during the last two miles.
After reading the credentials of the stranger and finding that he could
converse in Malay, the local magnate became quite cordial, and made X.
free of the Government Rest House. This was well furnished with beds and
tables, etc., but glass and crockery were not provided.

The Assistant Wodena conducted the visitor round the village, which was
a model of neatness. Each house stood in a garden, growing coffee,
vegetables, and strawberries. The head of the village and a few others
live in very good houses, and there seemed to be ponies without number.
The village perched on a slope and the cultivated hillside bore some
resemblance to a scene in the South of Italy. The usual signs of
prosperity and content reigned everywhere, and neither in this village,
nor elsewhere, where X. conversed with the natives could he find
anything to explain the commonly accepted view that the people of Java
are inimical to their rulers.

The Rest House proved comfortable, X. had brought his own provisions,
which his servants cooked, and for once he enjoyed a hot and palatable
meal. There was plenty of opportunity for conversation with the
Assistant Wodena, who was quite willing to discourse on the customs of
the country, and he gave a most interesting account of the elaborate
etiquette of Javanese Rajas, and of the extraordinary deference paid by
commoners to rank. He in his turn asked many questions concerning
Malacca and the Malay Straits, about which his interlocutor was able to
give him all the information sought for.

The next morning the sightseer and his followers ascended the mountain
on ponies to see the volcano. This was a kind of inferno with wicked
mouths which looked like ventilators from the bowels of the earth
spitting and hissing blinding steam.

The whole face of the mountain was yellow with sulphur, and the air was
sickening from its smell. Usoof and Abu were not a little terrified by
this awful experience, and grasped their Tuan by the arm entreating him
not to venture near what, they evidently thought, were the gates of
hell.

I feel that I have paid sufficient de