Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/282

260 travel will soon encourage the manufacture of ornamental krises, and in numbers to meet the certain fixed demand, so that later tourists will have better souvenirs than can be had now.

There is one whole street of sarong-shops in Solo, each little shop or open booth glowing with cloths of brilliant colors, and each shop standing in feudal dignity behind a tiny moat, with a mite of a foot-bridge quite its own. Solo sarongs presented many designs quite new to us, and the sarong-painters there employ a rich, dull, dark red and a soft, deep green in the long diamonds and pointed panels of solid color, relieved with borders of intricate groundwork, that tempt one to buy by the dozen. There were many sarongs, painted with four and five colors in fine, elaborate designs, that rose to ten and twenty United States gold dollars in value; but one's natural instincts protested against paying such prices for a couple of yards of cotton cloth, mere figured calico, forsooth, despite its artistic and individual merits. Our landlady at the Sleier had inducted us into much of the sarong's mysteries, qualities, and details of desirability, and we had the museum's rare specimens in mind; but we were distracted in choice, and the thing I desired, just any little scrap as an example of the prang rusa, or deer-fight, pattern, which only the imperial ones may wear, was not to be had anywhere in Solo. We looked in upon many groups of little women tracing out fine, feathery, first-outline designs in brown dye with their tiny funnel arrangements that are the paint-brushes of their craft; and we found one great cement-floored fabrik of sarongs, a regular factory or wholesale estab-