One hut we passed, where a very old man sat playing with a tiny baby, so exceedingly pretty, that we could not help stopping to admire it. With a proud smile he told us it was his great-grand-child. Its father and mother were living with him, and so indeed were all the other members of his numerous family, sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters who, each in turn, had wedded and brought a wife or a husband to the parental home.
Rice-barn shaped like a child's cradle.
"There are over a score of them" said the patriarch proudly. To him had, in truth, been granted the prayer, which, on their wedding-day Javanese couples put up to the gods "Give us a progeny like to the spreading crown of the waringin tree." And the venerable sire, trusting in his helpless old age to the love and piety of his children, reminded one of the parent trunk, which, when decaying, is upheld by the stalwart young trees that have sprung up around it.
We asked after his family. The children, the old man answered, were all out in the fields; no hands could be spared from the work just now. Only his youngest grand-daughter, the baby's mother, had stayed in the house, to look after the little one, and cook the familydinner. Yonder she was, at her bâtik-frame, painting the sarong-cloth with flowers and butterflies. The girl looked up as he spoke, turning a pretty face on us; and smiled.
"Ah! happy those that live among the woods and fields, if they but knew their happiness...." It seemed to me that these dessa-folk knew theirs.
And I filled my eyes and my heart with the scene before me—the low, brown roofs amidst the fruittrees, the merry-eyed children at play, the leisurely comings and goings of the women upon their daily occupation, with the rustling coolness and the soft green light of the bamboo leafage over it all; gathering all the gladsome beauty of it, that it might keep fresh and fragrant my thoughts, when I should have returned to the world outside, to the weariness, the fever and the fret to which we of the conquering race have condemned ourselves.
As we rode on, and the wood-enshrined hamlet disappeared among the folds of the hillrange, like the beautiful day-dream it all but seemed to me, I learnt that it was but a fair type of the prosperous dessa, such as it is found throughout the length and breadth of Java.
