who live in a bamboo
cottage, use nothing but a single bed on which the whole family sleep,
and a chest for clothes, both made, like the house, of bamboo.

[Illustration: WOMAN COOKING RICE.

KOMPOR.

_Page_ 51.]

The staple diet is rice and dried fish, with vegetables and fruits:
cakes and pastry are rare luxuries, and purchased at the market or from
itinerant vendors. The cooking arrangements are very simple. Nearly
everything is cooked in a _priok_, or frying-pan, which is heated over a
_kompor_, or stove of earthenware, or on bricks on a flat stove raised
from the ground. In both cases charcoal is burnt, being made to burn
brightly by a fan. The rice (which is to them what bread is to us) is
not _boiled_, but _steamed_. A copper vessel (_dang-dang_) is filled
with hot water, and the rice is then placed in a cone-shaped bamboo
basket (_koekoesan_), which is placed point downwards into the vessel
and covered with a bamboo or earthenware top (_kekep_). The dang-dang is
then placed over the fire either in the _kompor_ or on the bricks.

Rice culture is the natural pursuit of the Javanese or Sundanese native.
Coffee, sugar, and tea he cultivates on compulsion for wages with which
to pay his taxes. Now the land of Java is divided into two classes, land
capable of being inundated by streams or rivers called _sawah_, and land
not so inundated called _tegal_, or _gaga_. On the latter only the less
important crops, such as mountain rice or Indian corn, are grown. On
sawah land the rice is grown in terraces, which are so arranged that,
without any machinery for raising or cisterns for storing the water, a
perfectly natural and perpetual supply is gained from the high
mountains, which serve here the same useful purpose that the great river
Nile does in Egypt. The small fields are worked with the _patjoel_, a
sort of hoe, and the large with the plough (_wloekoe_), and then
inundated. After ten or fifteen days they are hoed again, so that any
places not reached by the plough or hoe may be laboured, and the
intervening banks kept free from weeds and consequently made porous. The
large sawahs are also harrowed with the _garoe_; and, finally, small
trenches are cut for the water to flow from one terrace to another. When
the earth has thus been worked into a mass of liquid mud, the young
plants are transplanted from the beds in which they have been sown about
a month previously, and carefully placed in this soft mud. Inundation