These are the official ones, as it were. How many unofficial
ones he has, no one knows but himself. The youngest of his children,
now five years old, was, I imagine, a good deal of a surprise, being
sometimes referred to by disrespectful Europeans as "the Joke of
Djokjakarta."

Djokjakarta, or Djokja, as it is commonly called, is set in the middle
of a broad and fertile plain, at the foot of the slumbering volcano of
Merapi, whose occasional awakenings are marked by terrific earthquakes,
which shake the city to its foundations and usually result in
wide-spread destruction and loss of life. It is a city of broad,
unpaved thoroughfares, shaded by rows of majestic waringins, and lined,
in the European quarter, by handsome one-story houses, with white
walls, green blinds and Doric porticos. There are two hotels in the
city, one an excellently kept and comfortable establishment, as hotels
go in Java; a score or so of large and moderately well-stocked European
stores, and many small shops kept by Chinese; an imposing bank of stone
and concrete; and one of the most beautiful race-courses that I have
ever seen, the spring race meeting at Djokja being one of the most
brilliant social events in Java. The busiest part of the city is the
Chinese quarter, for, throughout the Insulinde, commerce, both retail
and wholesale, is largely in the hands of these sober, shrewd,
hard-working yellow men, of whom there are more than three hundred
thousand in Java alone and double that number in the archipelago.
Beyond the European and Chinese quarters, scattered among the palms
which form a thick fringe about the town, are the _kampongs_ of the
Javanese themselves--clusters of bamboo-built huts, thatched with
leaves or grass, encircled by low mud walls. Standing well back from
the street, and separated from it by a splendid sweep of velvety lawn,
is the Dutch residency, a dignified building whose classic lines
reminded me of the manor houses built by the Dutch _patroons_ along
the Hudson. A few hundred yards away stands Fort Vredenburg, a moated,
bastioned, four-square fortification, garrisoned by half a thousand
Dutch artillerymen, whose guns frown menacingly upon the native town
and the palace of the Sultan. Though its walls would crumble before
modern artillery in half an hour, it stands as a visible symbol of
Dutch authority and as a warning to the disloyal that that authority is
backed up by cannon.

Between Fort Vredenburg and the Sulta