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Clad or bare, the Japanese foot has the antique symmetry: it has not yet been distorted by the infamous foot-gear which has deformed the feet of Occidentals. Of every pair of Japanese wooden clogs, one makes in walking a slightly different sound from the other, as kring to krang; so that the echo of the walker's steps has an alternate rhythm of tones.

The wind dropped between the houses; two oars were got out and the boat held on up-stream, the idea being to effect a lodgment in the centre of the town before the inhabitants could think of resistance. 'It seems, however, that the headman of the fishing village at Batu Kring had managed to send off a timely warning. A shout went up, and was followed by a clash of gongs all up the river.

In these letters we find life-like portraits of the scholars, poets, dramatists, musicians, singers, courtiers and travellers, who formed that brilliant society which received from their contemporaries the name of the "Muiden Circle" Muidener Kring. The genial and hospitable Drost loved to see around him those "five or six couple of friends," whom he delighted to invite to Muiden.

In the offing a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, stand out in the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a wall breached by the sea. 'There is a village of fisher-folk at the mouth of the Batu Kring branch of the estuary.

A few days of calm would have brought unmentionable horrors on board that schooner, but with the help of land and sea breezes, in less than a week after clearing the Sunda Straits, he anchored off the Batu Kring mouth within a pistol-shot of the fishing village.