Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/85

Rh adorable sort of dish-washing!—and the little community turned to its daily vocations. The men went away to work, or sat hammering and hewing with implements strangely Japanese, and held in each instance in the Japanese way. The women pounded and switched clothing to and fro in the stream, and spread it out in white and brilliant-colored mosaics on the bank to dry. They plaited baskets and painted sarongs, and the happy brown children, in nature's dress, rolled at play under the cocoanut-trees, or splashed like young frogs in and out of the stream.

While this went on below, and we watched the dark indigo mass of Salak turning from purple and azure to sunlit greens in the light of early day, the breakfast of the country was brought to our porch: cold toast, cold meats, eggs, fruit, tea or the very worst coffee in all the world—something that even the American railway restaurant and frontier hotel would spurn with scorn. Java coffee, in Java, comes to one in a stoppered glass bottle or cruet, a dark-brown fluid that might as well be walnut catsup, old port, or New Orleans molasses. This double extract of coffee, made by cold filtration, is diluted with hot water and hot milk to a muddy, gray-brown, lukewarm drink, that is uniformly bad in every hotel and public place of refreshment that a tourist encounters on the island. In private houses, where the fine Arabian berry is toasted and powdered, and the extract made fresh each day, the morning draught is quite another fluid, and worthy the cachet the name of Java gives to coffee in far countries.

Buitenzorg, the Bogor of the natives, who will not