Throughout the island, the carriages for hire are execrable. The four-pony victoria which took us from Djocjakarta to the Buddhist ruins at Parambanan had not gone half a mile when one of the wheels came off, and we were lucky to escape without serious damage. It will always remain a marvel to us how the ramshackle kreta held together which took us from Buitenzorg to Sindanglaya, over the Poentjak Pass, and we are astonished that the Dutch authorities, who are exacting in other respects, do not exercise a wholesome supervision over the ponies employed in these cross-country carts and carriages, for a more wretched collection of horseflesh could scarcely be imagined. We have already commented on the Toelatings Kaart. This relic of a past age, which did not add much to the revenue, and impressed one unfavourably with a rigid officialism at the port of entry that did not obtrude itself upon one's notice in the interior, may now be avoided by the traveller registering at the Tourist Bureau. In our own case, we were never called upon to produce the kaart. The general impression left by one's visit to Java is the excessive cleanliness of town and country and the widespread cultivation. There are, of course, black spots in the towns; but they are as nothing to the traveller who has perambulated the native quarters of any British Colony in the Far East. When we think of the millions of dollars Hongkong has expended to cope with filth-created plagues and to reduce the native rookeries of China town, it fills us with the highest admiration for Dutch administration in Java. The Government of the Straits Settlements is entering upon a similar campaign to rectify past sins against the laws of sanitation and hygiene, and hundreds of thousands of dollars might have been available for other purposes had the Chinese been handled as the Dutch handle them in Batavia, Samarang and Sourabaya. It may be overdoing the cult for whitewash to whiten the walls of every bridge and the stack of every sugar mill in the country, but it is pleasing to the Europeans to see that one nation has been successful in carrying its ideas of cleanliness into the tropics and in making the Oriental conform to the ordinary laws for the protection of the health of the common people. To those of our readers who may be induced to visit Java, we would tender a few words of advice.