would suppose that they would be welcomed
accordingly, but the Dutch are a business people and do not permit
sentiment to interfere with a chance to make a few honest guilders.

The Residency, I found upon inquiry, was two miles away, in the
outskirts of the town. And, as there are neither rickshaws nor
carriages for hire in Samarinda, I was compelled to walk. It was really
too hot to move. In five minutes my clothes were as wet as though I had
fallen in the river. The green silk lining of my sun-hat crocked and
ran down my face in emerald rivulets. When I had covered half the
distance I paused beneath a waringin tree to rest. A breath of breeze
from the river, sighing through the palms, brought to my streaming
cheeks a hint of coolness and to my nostrils more than a hint of the
garbage broiling on the beach. Anyone who could be romantic in Borneo
_must_ be in love.

The Assistant Resident, Monsieur de Haan, was as glad to see me as a
banker away from home is to see a copy of _The Wall Street Journal_. I
brought him a whiff of that great outside world from which he was an
exile, with whose doings he kept in touch only through the meager
despatches in the papers brought by the fortnightly mail-boat from
Java, or through occasional travelers like myself. Dutch officials in
the Indies can obtain leave only once in ten years and Monsieur de Haan
had not visited the mother country for nearly a decade, so that when he
learned I had recently been in Holland he was pathetically eager to
hear the gossip of the homeland. For an hour I lounged in a Cantonese
chair beneath the leisurely swinging punkah--the motive power for the
punkah being provided by a native on the verandah outside, who
mechanically pulled the cord even while he slept--and chatted of homely
things: of a restaurant which we both knew on the Dam in Amsterdam, of
bathing on the sands of Scheviningen, of band concerts on summer
evenings in the Haagsche Bosch. Only when his long-pent curiosity as to
happenings in Europe had been appeased did I find an opportunity to
mention the reasons which had brought me to Samarinda. I wished to go
up country, I explained. I wanted to see the real jungle and the
strange tribes which dwell in it; particularly I wished to see the
head-hunters. Now in this I was fully prepared for discouragement and
dissuasion, for head-hunters are not assets to a country; to a visitor
they are not displayed with pride. When, in the Philippines, I