All three quarters are possessed of a separate beauty. The elaborately carved pediments and ponderous doors, the heavy balconies and eaves of the houses, give an old-world quaintness to the first, which is enhanced by the crowd of many-shaped and variously coloured boats that line the quays that front the offices on either side of the Great River. Nothing could be more delightful than the setting of the red-tiled roofs, with their dragon-decorated ridges and parapets, on the wooden trellis fronts and canvas blinds of the Chinese houses. Weltevreden, too, is not without attractions. The broad porticoes of dazzling white, with their Ionic columns and marble floors, are often set in a fair surrounding of green trees. The compounds and gardens are always verdant, and sometimes radiant with bright-leaved shrubs and flowers. Especially the broad green-covered squares and the wide roads arched with noble trees speak of coolness and repose in a hot and weary land. On the outskirts of the town, along the country roads, where the cocoa palm and banana plantations begin, are the bamboo cottages of the Sundanese natives. But it is after nightfall that this place becomes a veritable fairyland. The open porticoes of the Dutch houses are seen to be thronged with gaily dressed people, the ladies often still wearing the sarong, and looking like Æneas' mother-- "Proved to be a goddess by her stately tread," and in harmony with the pillars and pediments about them. Everywhere lights gleam through foliage, and ever and again, through an air instinct with electric movement and heavy with perfumes, strains of music reach the ear from the open doorways, or are wafted in the distance from one of the numerous military bands, which are ever "discoursing sweet music" to the society of the capital. In the centre of the town the native streets look, to the European eye, like a perpetual festival. Outside the doors are gathered in groups the various inhabitants--Chinese, Malay, or Sundanese, some clanging cymbals and other strange instruments of music, others seated round fires, eating baked cakes or fruits and other frugal dainties. Meanwhile the streets are alive with the rush of numerous cahars[10] and sadoes, drawn by the agile native pony, and with itinerant vendors, who, bearing their baskets suspended from their shoulders by the _pikulan_, or cross-piece, each with a lamp fixed to the rearmost basket, flit to and fro noiselessly on their bare feet. [Footnote 10: Native carriage much like the sadoe, but never used by Europeans.]