Stately avenues of trees line the roads, and the few canals remaining are kept more clean than formerly. The modern houses are airy and spacious, generally of one story in height, and surrounded generally, with very wide piazzas. The avenues leading to the houses are kept neatly gravelled; and the grounds are adorned with trees, shrubs, and flowers: showing a correct taste which seems (to make use of a mercantile phrase) to have been imported from England, for it is quite at variance with the general style of laying out Dutch pleasure-grounds. In fact, there is an air of neatness and comfort displayed, which serves to divert the mind from dwelling too much on the fact, that you are living in the midst of this store-house of disease, where you are constantly warned by the inhabitants to keep away from every partial draft of air, for if the perspiration is checked, a fever or diarrhœa, or more fatal dysentery will ensue; and you are again warned, if the sea-breeze should set in _early_, before the sun has had time to absorb the exhalations, the malaria of the marshes, to keep within your room with closed doors. The night air is also highly deleterious, and the fervid rays of a noonday sun not less fatal, so that no person who is able fails to keep a carriage. Constant and profuse perspiration soon impairs the digestive organs, loss of appetite follows and debility ensues: mental and bodily exertion becomes painful, and the health is soon impaired. These are a _few_ among the _many, many_ drawbacks of an unhealthy tropical climate; yet every climate is to be found in Java, from the most unhealthy to the most salubrious, from swamps teeming with exhalations in the highest degree noxious, to the pure mountain-breeze, which brings health on its wings, and is redolent with the sweets wafted from a thousand fragrant flowers. The merchants go to the city about nine, take tiffin at their counting-houses at twelve, return to the country about four, and dine between six and seven. As soon as the lights appear on the table, it is the signal for the sport of myriads of moschetoes and midges. Boots are then indispensable, unless the feet and ankles are otherwise well covered; when the knife and fork do not claim the attention, your hands are industriously employed in driving off these eternal pests from the exposed parts of the body. The hospitality of the English, Scotch, and Americans, is proverbial, and they live upon the most amicable terms; there is none of that petty jealousy, and bad feeling, which is seen to exist among rival houses, in many other places.