Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/40

20 the driver's, must hold to the canopy-frame while he is switched about town backward in the footman's place, for one gulden or forty cents the hour.

Whether one comes to Java from India or China, there is hasty change from the depreciated silver currency of all Asia to the unaltered gold standard of Holland, and the sudden expensiveness of the world is a sad surprise. The Netherlands unit of value, the gulden (value, forty cents United States gold), is as often called a florin, a rupee, or a dollar—the "Mexican dollar" or the equivalent "British dollar" of the Straits Settlements, a coin which trade necessities drove British conservatism to minting, which act robs the Briton of the privilege of making further remarks upon "the almighty dollar" of the United States, with its unchanging value of one hundred cents gold. This confusion of coins, with prices quoted indifferently in guldens, florins, rupees, and dollars, is further increased by dividing the gulden into one hundred cents, like the Ceylon rupee, so that, between these Dutch fractions, the true cents of the United States dollar that one instinctively thinks of, and the depreciated cents of the British or the battered Mexican dollar, one's brain begins to whirl when prices are quoted, or any evil day of reckoning comes.

No Europeans live at Tandjon Priok, nor in the old city of Batavia, which from the frightful mortality during two centuries was known as "the graveyard of Europeans." The banks and business houses, the Chinese and Arab towns, are in the "old town"; but Europeans desert that quarter before sundown, and betake themselves to the "new town" suburbs, where