Page:Letters of a Javanese princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, 1921.djvu/188

LETTERS OF A JAVANESE PRINCESS Mantangan blesses the childless, will all be girls. Poor childless ones! We shall have to look for a holy tomb that will bless the world with boys, for there are all too many women in the world!

It was uphill work to make our artists carve wajang dolls. They were frightened to death for fear the wajang spirits would be angry with them. Father assured them that he would take all responsibility, that all consequences would be upon his own head, and that the anger and wrath of the spirits would smite him alone, the task-master, and not the workmen who had merely carried out his will.

It was most difficult to take a photograph in the Kampang. A superstition says that one shortens one's own life when one allows a photograph to be taken, and that a photographer is a great sinner; all the portraits that he makes will demand their lives of him in the after life. —166—