Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/296

234 washed, the streets watered, and so on. At the end of these streets is Fort Rotterdam, the church, Government House, and the residences of Dutch officials.

It is quite strange to be thus suddenly in a town again with civilisation round one, and it seems quite grand. The houses nestle amidst fine trees and old cocoanut palms, and have a solid comfortable look as if they had been long there and meant to stay. Near the old Dutch fort is a broad grassy playground with a bandstand and surrounded by straight avenues of old canary and tamarind trees. Beautiful tall palms border the fine broad roads.

The street life is most picturesque and interesting. The long street full of Chinese and native stores was crowded with vendors of all sorts of things going about.

Why should one have tender memories here of London lodging-house landladies? On account of the Macassar hair-oil, of course. Macassar for the hair was once the rage, and greasy heads everywhere reposed on the grimy chair-backs in the lodgings of London Town. The landladies there-fore invented what they called “antimacassars,” dreadful woollen, crocheted, and even “cruel” —or is it crewel?—arrangements they hung over their grimy chair-backs to preserve them from the Macassar hair-oil on your head, and whenever you went out to see your best girl the antimacassar stuck to your buttons and went with you, and so you lost your dignity and your chance with that girl, and you owed it all in reality to this place!

I visited the club-house, the church, and then lunched at the M Hotel, which was very bad. The great, fat, bloated Dutch proprietress, dressed in the usual white dressing-jacket and the sarong —a coloured checked cloth wrapped round her