Unfortunately, this rebuke did not thereupon took the church Bible and banged it hard upon the skirting-board of the pulpit. The noise was outrageous, and this time the sleeper opened an eye. But, with an obstinacy that was truly great, the reprobate made no movement to show that his conscience was touched by a sense of his crime. He kept his head recumbent on his arms and his face turned away until the sermon ended, and the wrathful minister gave us leave to go home. with a Carlylean expression of sadness; | but he had no ear for music; and as he arouse the offender. The minister improvised a tune of his own he could not help leading the rest of us into a Stygian pool of unparalleled discordances. We enjoyed this very much. It was therefore a shock when, on the fourth Sunday, at the time of the Psalm, the minister called to a tall, red-haired young man, who could sing without quavering, and bade him supersede the elder. The latter gentleman looked at us under his shaggy grey eyebrows, as much as to say, "The sooner you go south again the better. Have I done. At another time we were honored by the lining,' man and boy for forty the presence of a "man" in church. years, to be thus humbled in my old He was one of the survivors of the age, in order that a couple of strangers formidable body of lay preachers, who may hear what is thought to be good in their day did much, in a rough singing? Anyway, this big young man fashion, to evangelize the Highlands. has little real unctuousness about These itinerant preachers and prayers men.' They him." were known as the Small as this hamlet was, it held were not generally loved by the clergy churches of two denominations - the of any denomination, because they conFree and the Established. The latter sidered it a duty publicly to criticise seldom had a congregation of more than their ordained brethren, without the five, while the former, which we at-least regard for their feelings. On the tended, was crowded for both services. Every one knows the tale about the elders who expostulated with their minister because he always preached on one of three subjects: original sin, regeneration, and eternal punishment. They begged him to give them something fresh. other hand, the ordained clergy charged them with spiritual pride, and an overfondness for the free quarters and whiskey which they accepted as their due wherever they went. Thus it has come about that during the great religious occasion of the Highland year- comThis, having lectured munion week-when a "" man rises them for their discontent, he promised to do. Nevertheless, not a Sunday passed on which he did not drag in more or less irrelevant reference to his three favorite dogmas. It was the same here in Sutherlandshire. Our minister's Calvinism was of the gloomiest kind. Faces grew visibly longer as he proceeded with his chilling denunciations; and he and his congregation sighed in unison about the miseries of time and the tortures of eternity. Once, however, a man fell asleep in the midst of it all. For a minute or two he was unobserved from the pulpit. Then came a dead silence. The minister reddened and looked very fierce. "I think," he remarked in falsetto, "that those who sleep in church must have very cold hearts." to address the multitude assembled from all parts of the country, every one knows what is coming. The priests may not like it, but the people do. These enthusiasts were men who, "in speaking to the question at religious meetings, brought all their mental vigor, untrammelled by learning, to bear upon the things of God." The Scotch writer just quoted proceeds curiously. "Never, surely, is there a more attractive exercise of intellect than when, divested of all literary acquirements, it enters directly into the mysteries of the kingdom,' and comes forth in a panoply of Scripture truth. Light from heaven then irradiates all the gifts of the speaker. Traces of learning, mingled with the halo of this light, would be spots of darkness." The "man" whom we were privileged to see wore a white cotton nightcap, pointed with a tassel, and was wrapped to the chin in a thick plaid. In this singular costume he sat close under the pulpit, so that he might not lose a single word of the sermon, and with his face and manner so suggestive of a "chiel" taking notes for the complainant that he would certainly have discomfited a man less secure in his own self-esteem than our minister. Well, at length the time came for us to leave our sequestered little valley. The season grew late, and it was mortally cold throwing the fly for fish that got less and less inquisitive about the strange works of art with which we tempted them. The winds, too, blew gales every other day, and the rain fell in sheets. Where the river ran through the loch into the sea, there was constant angry strife between the full, chocolate-colored waves of the peaty stream, and the tall green breakers of the Atlantic. Our cottage now showed that it was not watertight. It was not so bad as the houses in Lewis, where a man pulls on his sea-boots before getting off his bed. But neither was it all it might have been. The wet oozed through the thick thatch and the birch-bark under the thatch, and dropped upon us and our chattels with great impartiality. Some of these northern clergy are very eccentric men. We heard of one poor fellow who as a bachelor had to submit to the tyranny of an aunt or an elder sister in the guise of housekeeper. As if to hint to her that he would rather be alone, the minister one day invited the carpenter into the house and got the lady's measure. By and by a coffin appeared. It was put under the minister's own bed for security, and perhaps that he might the more often comfort Other signs indicated that the year himself with the sight of it. However, was hurrying towards the dark months. it happened that the housekeeper sud- We were visited by various itinerants denly went away to be married, and-bronzed, bearded men in blue jerthen, such is the perversity of human nature, the minister himself pined and died, and was buried in the coffin he had bought for another. The same minister twice held this Sutherlandshire cure. He was first summoned from it by a call from an influential community in Glasgow. But after a time, the fickle townspeople had had enough of him, and contrived to make him abdicate. He then returned to the north, humbled in spirit and broken in health, and sought to regain his earlier manse. The authorities were willing, but the parishioners were not. And finally he had to be reinducted at the point of the bayonet. His congregation thereafter seldom or never numbered as many as four. With such a sad experience of life and the ways of men, no wonder the poor fellow became whimsical, and fell a ready prey to feminine despotism. His is the only grave in the little churchyard of his whitewashed church by the side of a loch, where it joins the sea. A vigorous young rowan-tree is planted at the head of it to memorialize him. seys, with ear-rings in their ears, and smelling of the sea; pedlars moving south, etc. Our landlady was flustered by so much company, and the frequent need of lowering her skirts that she might receive her guests with grace. The herring-boats had discharged their crews, and the men were making for home from Wick and Thurso, with the few pounds or shillings in their pockets which stood for the remnant of their meagre earnings during months of toil. One day a man appeared with a phial of pearls, some white, some brown. They were from mussels at the mouth of a neighboring river. In old days the lords of Reay gave their wives rich necklets of these jewels, all found on their estate. But nowadays the finds are scanty and poor. Moreover our good "wive" began to arrange her wheel for spinning the wool used in knitting and weaving through— out the winter. "She is black and old, but she is a good easy thing. She goes well with the grease in her, and the wool it comes from her well too." Thus we heard the whirr of the wheel as well as the patter of the rain, the rush of the case with the Dutch in Java. In the river, and the cry of the wind. And so it came to pass that on one rather sorrowful day we said good-bye to the place, under pressure drank a parting glass of cream, and climbed the opposite hillsides towards the south. The valley was half veiled with watery mist when we saw it last from the brow of the hill; but the green pastures of our cottage, the crimson shading of the heather on the slopes, and the long course of the river where it ran towards the distant loch, were visible through the mist. From The Fortnightly Review. SOCIAL TRAITS OF THE DUTCH IN JAVA. IN a certain charming passage in his "Journal Intime" Amiel gives us his theory of society. In it he sees an attempt on the part of the cultivated classes to reconstruct an ideal past, or to formulate "a harmony of things which every-day reality denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a glimpse. In society," he says, "people are expected to behave as if they lived on ambrosia and concerned themselves with nothing but the loftiest interests. Anxiety, need, passion, have no existence. All realism is suppressed as brutal. In a word, what we call 'society' proceeds for the moment on the flattering, illusory assumption that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods." The truth of this picture seems the more remarkable when we consider that it comes from the pen of a learned recluse. But Amiel is careful to point out that he is speaking only of "society" as it appears in the Old World. At first sight the existence of cultivated communities, such as the planters of Virginia, thousands of miles away from Europe, would seem to show that this limitation is too rigorous. But the contradiction is more apparent than real; for such societies are European in all but the accident of geographical position. The settlers have changed "temperature," not "temperament." This is eminently that fertile island is to be found a social system in which the characteristic traditions of European society have not only been preserved, but in which the conditions of the place have been used to accentuate the aristocratic instincts common to the higher classes of all European nations. We are so accustomed to speak and write of our great Asiatic possession as "India" that few people remember now that the original "India" of the East India Company was not India at all, but Java. It was here, and not in India, that Captain Lancaster founded the first settlement of the Company in 1602. Compared with British India of to-day, Java-with the rest of the Dutch East Indies thrown in, for the matter of that- appears almost trivial. But this comparative insignificance does not prevent Java from being in itself a singularly valuable possession, nor palliate the blunder which was committed by the British government in surrendering this island to its present masters in 1814. With an area scarcely larger than that of England, it has a population of twenty-three million inhabitants. Its people are possessed of a classic literature, and their past history is illumined by the vast ruins of fanes and cities built at the period of the Hindu supremacy. It is a very garden for fertility. The business of the great majority of the Dutch residents in the island is to rule. Of course, there are merchants and planters as well as officials. But even where commerce in some form or other is the immediate object in view, the merchant or planter is so continuously brought into contact with native races that the possession of a certain capacity for command is a condition precedent to success. Moreover, the Dutch in Java are not mere birds of passage as the English are in India. To assure himself of this the visitor has only to glance round the streets of Weltrevreden, the European quarter of Batavia, in the early morning, and observe the troops of boys and girls who are to be seen on their way to school, who attacked the British Embassy at Fez. A consciousness of racial superiority, and a certain inherited aptitude for command, form the leading "note" in the character of the European residents in Dutch as in British India. This, together with a certain natural luxuriousness associated with the tropical climate and tropical verdure, and the abundance of native labor before mentioned, have united in reproducing in the Dutch communities in Java some of the characteristics of ancient Greek and Roman society based upon the institution of slavery. Although the island lies only a few given us an example of the type of degrees south of the equator, its com- woman which similar surroundings and parative narrowness and insularity, traditions develop among Anglo-Incombined with the high levels of the dians. Still more recently we have had mountainous plateaux of the interior, the spectacle of Lady Euan Smith coolly render it suitable for European occupa- photographing the Moorish ruffians tion. The painful separation of parents and children, necessary in British India, is not necessary in Java, and 'when children are sent home to be educated it is from social and not climatic considerations. Although many of the Dutch in Java do indeed look forward to returning to Holland after they have 'made a fortune, on the other hand, no inconsiderable proportion of the residents are persons whose families have been settled in the island for several generations, and for whom Java is "" home." It should be remembered also that there are only fifty thousand Europeans to twenty-three million natives. For the Dutch in Java, therefore, life is worth living; since the abundance and cheapness of native labor has placed that "leisure" which is so necessary an element in the higher social life conspicuously within their reach. Only lately in this review 1 "Ouida" has lamented the disappearance of the social butterfly in England. "There are no butterflies in this fast, furious, fussy age. They all died in the eighteenth century," she says. Their place has been taken by the "locust." Not the locust known "to Eastern travellers and Biblical stu'dents, but a greedy, two-legged crea- an unfailing indication of the stranger. ture, characterized by a capacity for It is easy to understand why the light stoking" " and an excessive subservi- and comfortable cotton and silk garency to persons in the possession of certain material advantages. We read 2 that on the slopes of Mount Arjoeno Mr. Wallace found a specimen of the rare and beautiful calliper butterfly. Perhaps if "Ouida" were transported to the Tropics she might find her social butterfly flitting among the Ionic pillars and radiant gardens with which the Dutch surround their East Indian homes. We know the sort of character which -such conditions produce. Manipur has 1 The Fortnightly for December. But that which is at first sight the most remarkable feature in the Dutch mode of life is one in no way indicative of a high social standard. It is a certain peculiarity of dress, food, and domestic arrangements that rivets the attention of the new arrival. Of these Javan eccentricities that which is most in evidence, and most considerable in itself, is the combined novelty and scantiness of the costume in which the Dutch array themselves for the best part of the day. In the matter of dress they appear to have adopted the old Greek notions; and in Java, as in Hellas, a superfluity of dress has become ments used by both men and women should be adopted in a tropical climate.; it is the extraordinary carelessness and slovenliness with which such garments are worn that is reprehensible. It is not merely that the Dutch ladies have partially adopted the native costume, but such is the magical effect of climate that both men and women display a strange disregard of the proprieties when dressed in the remarkable dishabille which they respectively affect. Constant bathing is both necessary and delightful in such a climate, but that fact is not in itself a sufficient excuse for a gentleman appearing at the public | never occurred to him that the great breakfast in his hotel dressed in his square object-looking with its coversleeping suit, and with a towel thrown ing of mosquito curtains more like a over his shoulder. But in Java such huge birdcage than anything else - was incidents are in no way uncommon. a bed. He knows better now, and proThe visitor is soon initiated, for these ceeds to examine it with interest beeccentricities of manners and costume fore turning in for the night. He finds are nowhere else so pronounced as in that the large square mattress is covthe courtyard of an hotel. The appear-ered by a sheet, but otherwise entirely ance of the building is in all respects devoid of bedclothing; at the top are somewhat startling to persons fresh two pillows for the head, and down the from Europe or Australia. The huge centre is placed a long round bolster portico, with its Greek pillars, its marble floor, and motley groups of Europeans, interspersed with dark-skinned native servants, presents a picture in which there is a decided but not unpleasing suggestion of Asiatic life. In passing through the reception and dining rooms to the back of the hotel, he notices little that is novel. It is only on entering the courtyard, round which the majority of the bedrooms his own included are ranged, that he realizes how entirely novel and amusing is the dwelling of which he has become a temporary inmate. called a Dutch wife. This scarcely comes up to his notion of what a bed should be, but after he has slept (or tried to sleep) for two or three nights in the hot, steamy atmosphere of Batavia, he changes his mind. He finds that bedclothes are not wanted in the coast towns of Java, and in particular he learns to appreciate the relief which he experiences by throwing arm or leg over that useful contrivance for securing coolness, the Dutch wife. Again he feels a sort of natural timidity when the next morning he follows his "boy," In the broad or native servant, to the distant bathverandahs on either side of the tree- room. He has never walked so far in planted and gravelled space are ladies his pyjamas before in broad daylight. and gentlemen sitting in lounge chairs, The bath-room, too, is not quite what singly or in groups, in the most négligé attitudes and the scantiest but most brilliant costumes. Here and there a solitary man reclines at ease, with a table by his side, in an ample caneseated chair, over the long arms of which he throws his legs in an attitude more comfortable than elegant. Native servants run to and fro in and among the guests, and pedlars - Malay, Java- story told of a newly arrived midshipnese, or Chinese are doing a brisk man at Singapore. Finding a huge trade with their flimsy wares. The earthenware jar in the middle of an cabs and well-appointed carriages which drive in and out of the courtyard serve to heighten the incongruity of the scene, for the strange figures in the verandahs show no discomposure in conversing with the smartly attired occupants of cabs or carriages. In such an atmosphere of novelty the European visitor is naturally prepared for surprises. Nor is he disappointed. The very bed on which he reclines at night affords him considerable opportunity for reflection. At first sight it he expected. For in Java, as in some other Eastern countries, the bather, instead of getting into the bath, takes water from a square cistern, or some other receptacle for water, and pours it with a hand-bucket over himself as he stands in the centre of the marble (or brick) floored room. Apropos of this system of bathing there is an amusing otherwise empty room, he concluded that this was the bath, and after some difficulty succeeded in getting into it! Once in, he could not get out. At last in desperation he rolled the jar over on to the hard floor and triumphantly emerged from the fragments. In my own case I was most disturbed in using these hotel bath-rooms by a harrowing reflection as to the waste water. It ran away at the edges of the marble floor; that was plain enough; but did it come back again through the efforts of the |