It is two in the afternoon, and I have just taken the curious Javan meal called _rice-table_. Everyone else in the hotel, visitors and servants alike, are asleep. The doors of my rooms are all open, and there is a through draught from the courtyard to the verandah, where I am seated in a long easy chair with arms extending at will after the manner of the tropics. By my side on a table are placed cigars, a glass of iced claret and water, and a novel. The view from the back rooms of the Hôtel Belle Vue at Buitenzorg is famous. This afternoon I am looking at it for the last time, and it seems more wonderful than ever. Let me try to describe it. Immediately in front is the great triangular mass of Mount Salak. The peak is 7000 feet above sea-level, and, like most of the Javan mountains, it rises to its full height almost clear from its base. The lower levels are luxuriantly covered with tropical forests, a covering which gradually thins and dwindles until the apex of the triangle stands out sharply against the sky. Between the hotel and the mountain there stretches a sea of waving treetops. In the distance it is deep blue; as it approaches it grows more and more green; then separate forms of palms and bamboos can be distinguished, with red-tiled or brown-thatched roofs showing between them. Immediately beneath me is the brown river Tjiliwong, with bamboo cottages on its banks and natives bathing in its waters. Inside the courtyard no one is stirring. The dreamy silence is only broken by the voices that rise from the river below, by the clacking of the sarong weaver's shuttle or the dull boom of a far-away tom-tom. Under such circumstances the conditions necessary for perfect physical enjoyment are very fully realized. Yet it is at such moments that one is apt to reflect how unimportant are these material considerations compared with the advantages of strenuous and reasoned action. One longs for the stir of life as it is felt in the great centres of European population; "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Well, I was going to see some European energy on the morrow. At Batavia an English resident had said, "When you are at Buitenzorg you should go on to Soekaboemi and see a coffee plantation.' Subsequently he wrote that his friend H---- would expect me on Tuesday at his coffee plantation with an unpronounceable name in the Preanger district. The morrow was Tuesday.