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The little boy loved the ricefields, dearly, for he knew that all the good food for all the people came from them; and he often helped his grand father to watch over them. One day, the grandfather was standing alone, before his house, looking far down at the people, and out at the sea, when, suddenly, he saw something very strange far off where the sea and sky meet.
Two of the porters came on with us, as much for love as for money, as far as Kamiichi, where we were to get kuruma. A long tramp we had of it across leagues of ricefields, and for a part of the way beside a large, deep canal, finely bowered in trees, and flowing with a swift, dark current like some huge boa winding stealthily under the bamboo.
As in most Eastern countries, the ox is used in Java for drawing carts and for other agricultural purposes; but the buffalo is the most valuable of all animals to the natives, by whom it is especially employed in the cultivation of the ricefields. The only dangerous animal is the tiger, and the sport of tiger-hunting still forms one of the recreations of the native princes.
To the left the picturesque shores were fringed with clumps of bamboo, then a hill overlooking the lake, with wide ricefields beyond, then red roofs amid the deep green of the trees, the town of Kalamba, and beyond the shore-line fading into the distance, with the horizon at the back closing down over the water, giving the lake the appearance of a sea and justifying the name the Indians give it of dagat na tabang, or fresh-water sea.
There too came the characteristic military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned ricefields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war." So read the celebrated field order.
Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields, the growling of hundreds of work-people, plotting sedition in back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-coloured, and bones lie unburied.
Were his thoughts with his heart, ten thousand miles away, beyond the billowy wastes of the Pacific? among the ricefields and the plumy palms of China? under the shadows of remembered mountain peaks, or in groves of bloomy shrubs and strange forest trees unknown to climes like ours?
"What demons you are!" cried Michel Ardan, when his companion had depicted this scene to him with much energy. "Yes, we are," replied J. T. modestly; "but we had better make haste." Though Michel Ardan and he had crossed the plains still wet with dew, and had taken the shortest route over creeks and ricefields, they could not reach Skersnaw in under five hours and a half.
The circle, small as it was, sufficed to disclose a yawning gulf on the side, to which the path clung with the persistency of infatuation. The first thing to tell us of approach to human habitation was the croaking of the frogs. After the wildness of our day it sounded like some lullaby of Mother Earth, speaking of hearth and home, and we knew that we were come back to ricefields and man.
Rice varieties which grew again after being cut and produced a second, but very much smaller harvest, disappeared from now on. Furthermore, fish were kept in the ricefields and produced not only food for the farmers but also fertilized the fields, so that continuous cultivation of ricefields without any decrease in fertility became possible.
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