The Chinese quarter.
A duke it was, sure enough, who stood sponsor to the spot. But as (according to French authorities) there are fagots and fagots, even so there are Dukes and Dukes—and vastly more points of difference than of resemblance between Viola's gentle prince, and the thunderous old Lord of Saxen-Weimar, to whose rumbling Kreuzdonnerwetters and Himmel-Sakraments this abode of romance re-echoed some fifty years ago. A distant relative to the King of the Netherlands, he was indebted to his Royal kinsman's sense of family duty for these snug quarters, a very considerable income (from the National Treasury) and the post of an Army Commander, which upheld the prince in the pensioner. His tastes were few and simple, and saving the one delight of his soul, a penurious youth, and the hardships of the Napoleonic supremacy having so thoroughly taught him the habit, that it had become a second nature to him; and would not be ousted now by the mere fact of his having become rich. He was proud of his parsimony too, prouder even than of his swearing, remarkable as it was; and, amidst the pomp and circumstance he had so late in life attained to, neglected not the humble talents which had solaced his less affluent days. So that, looking upon the many goodly acres around his palace, lying barren of all save grass, flowers, blossoming trees, and such like useless stuff, he at once saw what an unique opportunity it would afford him for the exercise of his favourite virtue. And, setting about the matter in his own thorough-going way, he cut down the trees, ploughed up the grassplots, and had the grounds neatly laid out in onion-beds, and plantations of the sirih, which the Javanese loves. Here one might meet the Duke of a morning—a portly, bald-pated, red-faced old warrior with a prodigious "meerschaum" protruding from his bristling white beard, stars, crosses, and goldlace all over his general's uniform, and a pair of list slippers on his rheumatic old toes. An orderly walked behind him, holding a gold-edged sunshade over his shining pate. And, every now and then, the Duke would stop to look earnestly at his crops; and, stooping with a groaning of his flesh, and a creaking of his tight tunic, straighten some trailing plant, or flick an insect off the sirih leaves.
"The Duke was in his kitchen-garden,
A counting of his money,"
as one might vary the nursery rhyme.
"The West monsoon has set in, flooding the town."
For money it was he counted, when he gazed so long and earnestly at his vegetables—the alchemy of his thrifty imagination turning every young stalk and sprouting leaflet into a bit of metal, adorned with his Royal kinsman's effigy. And when the green pennies-to-be were plentiful, well content was the gardener; and if not—"Mountains and vales and floods, heard Ye those oaths?" Tradition has kept an echo of them. They were something quite out of the common order, and with a style and sound so emphatically their own as to baffle imitation, and render description a hopeless task.
"The Kali Batawi on its way through the Chinese quarter."