Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/252

 so far as it is not covered by the house; thus, in India, the expression, “garden estate” would be a pleonasm. There are no houses, or very few, without such ground. Some estates contain wood, and garden, and field, and make you think of a park; others are flower-gardens; elsewhere, again, the whole estate is one large grass-field; and lastly, there are some very simple ones reduced to a macadamised square, which is perhaps less agreeable to the eye, but which promotes cleanliness in the houses, because many insects are harboured by grass or trees. Havelaar’s “estate” was very large; yes, however strange it may sound, it might be called on one side boundless, as it was bordered by a ravine that extended to the shores of the Tji-Udjung, the river that surrounded Rankas-Betong with one of its many windings. It would be difficult to say where the ground of the Assistant Resident’s house ended, and where the common commenced, as the great ebb-tides and floods of the Tji-Udjung, which at this time had drawn back its shores as far as the horizon, and which at another time filled the ravine up to very near Havelaar’s house, changed its limits every moment. This ravine had always been a thorn in the eye of Madam Slotering,—that was very clear. The vegetable growth, everywhere so rapid in India, was always particularly luxuriant, on account of the mud that was left behind, to such an extent that, though the rising and falling of the water happened with a force that rooted up and carried