Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/197

 ing, as was very natural. The vegetation, already everywhere in India so rapid in its growth, was, owing to the incessant accretion of river-ooze, most luxuriant; so much so that, even if the advancing and retiring waters had moved with a violence that uprooted and carried off the brushwood, yet there would have been but very little time required to cover the ground again with all the scrubby plant-life which rendered the cleaning up of the grounds, even in the immediate vicinity of the house, so difficult. And this caused no end of annoyance, even to others than the mother of the family. For without speaking of all sorts of insects, which usually of an evening flew round the lamp in such numbers as to make reading and writing an impossibility (a trouble known in many places in India), there were also in this brushwood a number of snakes and other animals, which did not confine themselves to the ravine, but were over and over again also found in the garden and behind the house, or on the grass-plot in the front square.

This square confronted one when standing in the outer veranda with one’s back to the house. To the left of it was the building with the offices, the Treasury and the meeting-room where in the morning Havelaar had addressed the Chiefs, and behind it extended the ravine, which one overlooked as far as the Tjioodyoong. Exactly opposite the offices stood the old assistant-residency, now temporarily occupied by Mrs. Slotering; and as the access from the main road to the grounds lay along two roads that passed by the two sides of the grass-plot, it follows that anyone entering the grounds to go to the kitchen or stables behind the chief building had to pass either the offices or Mrs. Slotering’s house. Alongside and behind the chief building lay the large garden which had appealed to Tine on account of the many flowers she found there, and especially because little Max would often play there.

Havelaar had sent his excuses to Mrs. Slotering for not having called on her yet. He proposed to go the next day, but Tine had already been, and made acquaintance. We have already heard that the lady was a so-called “native child,” who spoke no other lan-