Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/182

162 the bright sarongs and turbans, and, above all, the cheerful chatter, were quite inspiring. We bought everywhere—fruits, and a queer three-story basket to hold them; yards of jasmine garlands, bunches of roses, and great double handfuls of the green, lindenish ylang-ylang flowers, pinned with a thorn in a plantain-leaf cornucopia—this last lot of perpetual fragrance for three gulden cents only. Odd bottles of home-made attars of rose and jasmine were sold as cheaply, and gums in straw cases, ready for burning. There was a dry-goods district, where booths were piled high and hung round with Cheribon and other gay sarongs of Middle Java, slandangs and kerchiefs of strongest colors and intricate borderings. We were distracted with the wide choice offered, but could not rouse the phlegmatic dealers to any eagerness or excitement in bargaining; the whole overcharge, reductions, and slow-descending fall in prices proceeding, on the part of the dealers, with a well-assumed indifference, an uninterrupted betel-chewing, a bored and lethargic manner that wore one sadly. A long row of country tailors, thirty or forty of them in a line, sat like so many sparrows around the edges of the passer in the comforting shade of the kanari-trees. All were spectacled like owls, and sat cross-legged before their little American sewing-machines. The customers brought their cloth, the tailors measured them with the eye, and in no time at all the machines were humming up and down the seams of the jackets, that needed no fitting nor trying on, and were made while the candidates sat and smoked and chatted with the sartorial artists. From the chatter-chatter along this