decorated barge, given to him by the East India Company; other boats, plying between Taman Sari and Taman Ledok, were at the disposal of the ladies of the royal household desirous of an outing with their babies; two small skiffs left their moorings every night alternately, at a signal given on a _bendeh_, to feed the fishes, which knew the sound and assembled in shoals. The guard-rooms near the northern watergate, of which the remaining one, _i.e._ the one not altogether fallen into ruin, shelters in the morning a motley crowd of sellers of fruit, vegetables, sweetmeats, etc., witnesses to the Company’s dragoons, protecting and shadowing their Highnesses of Surakarta and Jogjakarta with the princes of their blood, already having been entrusted with that task in the days of Mangku Buwono I. Of the delicately carved woodwork hardly a trace remains, but some foliage and birds among flowers, executed in stucco, give evidence of a good taste which knew how to make old motives subservient to new requirements. Though a Muhammadan pleasance, designed by a Muhammadan architect for a Muhammadan prince, the _garuda_ over one of the entrances, the Banaspatis on gables and fronts in Taman Sari and Taman Ledok, the _nagas_ coping the balustrades of the staircases, show that Hindu conceptions continued to leaven Javanese art. The relations with China and the consequent influx of Chinamen have also borne their fruit in Central Java as in Cheribon and the eastern kingdoms: Reimer informs us that the galleries and tops (now gone) of the several buildings were constructed like pointed vaults, and were wrought “in the manner of Chinese roofs”; Pulu Gedong was famous for the lofty Chinese tower erected near the spring which furnished the water for the “castle”, its lakes, ponds, tanks and canals, and for the irrigation of its grounds. The orchards, renowned for their mangoes and pine-apples, the vegetable-, sirih- and flower-gardens had a great reputation in the land; assiduous attention was paid to horticulture on the principle, well understood by oriental gardeners, that flower-beds, ornamental groves and bowers are like women; that however much art and pains are bestowed on their make-up, the art of arts is the concealment thereof.... Writing this it occurs to me how properly a western version of that universally approved maxim has been put in the mouth of _Gärtnerinnen_, _niedlich_ and _galant_: [Illustration: XIV. WATER-CASTLE AT JOGJAKARTA (Centrum.)] _Denn das Naturell der Frauen Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt._[79]