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ssageries Maritimes, and the Netherlands India Companies. I was agreeably surprised at the size and convenience of the station at Tanjong Priok. The booking clerk, who was, I think, a Chinaman, seemed to know the ways of strangers, and I and my fellow-passengers had no difficulty in taking tickets for Batavia. The line passed through groves of cocoa-nut palms, intersected with canals. Everything was quaint and interesting, the canal boats, the buffalo ploughs, the gaily-feathered birds,--all revealed a new and delightful phase of life and nature. We were immensely struck with the appearance of a native cutting grass. He had a hooked blade of steel fastened to a long handle, forming an instrument not unlike a cleek or other golf-stick. This he slowly swung round his head, and each time it touched the ground cleared about three inches of grass. The thing looked too absurd. We all wanted to get out and ask him how long he expected to be mowing that strip of grass by the canal-side. While I was on board ship I had been fortunate enough to borrow a Malay phrase-book from a man who had visited the Archipelago before, and during the voyage to Batavia I had amused myself with copying out some of the phrases and committing them to memory. On landing I found these few phrases extremely useful, and I mention the fact by way of encouragement, and in case any other traveller should be inclined similarly to beguile the tedium of the voyage. He will have his reward. When Mr. Wallace visited Java in 1861, he tells us he found no conveyances in Batavia except "handsome two-horse carriages," costing something under a sovereign a day. He justly complains of the expensiveness of these vehicles, and also of the cost of the post-carriages which then formed the sole means of locomotion in the interior of the island. To-day things are greatly improved. To say nothing of the railway system which connects the large towns in the east and west, Batavia is provided with an excellent tramway, and with a capital supply of small vehicles called _sadoes_. [Illustration: THE KING'S PLAIN, BATAVIA. _Page_ 67.] The sadoe is the hansom of Java. It is a small two-wheeled carriage, in which the seats are placed back to back (hence the name, which is a corruption of dos-a-dos), and which is furnished with a square top to keep off the sun. It is drawn by one (or two) of the sturdy little horses bred in the island. At a pinch these vehicles will ho
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