the Oranje at Surabaya, the Grand at
Djokjakarta, and the Indies at Batavia, are quite excellent in spots,
with orchestras, iced drinks, electric fans, and well-cooked food.
Though every room has a bath--a necessity in such a climate--tubs are
quite unknown, their place being taken by showers, or, in the simpler
hostleries, by barrels of water and dippers. The mattresses and pillows
appeared to be filled with asphalt, though it should be remembered that
a soft bed is unendurable in the tropics. Every bed is provided with a
cylindrical bolster, six feet long and about fifteen inches in
diameter, which serves to keep the sheet from touching the body. They
are known as "Dutch widows."

If you are fond of good coffee, I should strongly advise you to take
your own with you when you go to Java. From my boyhood "Old Government
Java" had been a synonym in our household for the finest coffee grown,
so my astonishment and disappointment can be imagined when, at my first
breakfast in Java, there was set before me a cup containing a dubious
looking syrup, like those used at American soda-water fountains, the
cup then being filled up with hot milk. The Germans never would have
complained about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns,
had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was
the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a
blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per
cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now
planted with the African species, called _Coffea robusta_, and thirteen
per cent with another African species, _Coffea liberia_, and the rest
with Japanese and other varieties. Though the term "Mocha and Java" is
still used by the trade in the United States, few Americans of the
present generation have ever tasted either, for virtually no Mocha
coffee and very little Java have been imported into this country for
many years.

The lazy, leisurely, luxurious existence led by the great Dutch
planters in Java is in many respects a counterpart of that led by the
wealthy planters of our own South before the Civil War. Dwelling in
stately mansions set in the midst of vast estates, waited upon by
retinues of native servants, they exercise much the same arbitrary
authority over the thousands of brown men who work their coffee, sugar
and indigo plantations that the cotton-growers of the old South
exercised over their slaves. I