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Work goes on in rice-field and plantation, but no church bell rings from the closed chapel outside the gates, and no sign of religion is evident, whether from mosque, temple, or church. Lovely lanes form alluring vistas.
I had heard from Satya that the Bolpur house was surrounded by fields of ripening rice, and that playing in these with cowherd boys was an everyday affair, of which the plucking, cooking and eating of the rice was the crowning feature. I eagerly looked about me. But where, oh, where was the rice-field on all that barren heath?
The Kru quarters are at the western base of the hill; a few hands, however, live in the two little villages upon the Tákwá rivulet. The Sierra Leone and Akra artificers occupy their own hamlet between the Kru lines and the stamps. Last year there was a garden with a small rice-field, but everything was stolen as soon as it was fit to gather. Next morning Mr. MacLennan led me to the diggings.
The peasant, toiling in the flooded sawas, and occupied from seedtime to harvest in the arduous labour demanded by the rice-field, combines with his agricultural work the idea of a sacred duty to the divinities who gave him the staple commodity whereon his life mainly depends.
He and his four companions had been chipping the camphor trees up in the woods; suddenly the armed savages had leaped out upon them and he alone of the five had escaped. At last they left the dangerous mountain and came down into the Kap-tsu-lan plain. On every side was rice-field after rice-field, with the water pouring from one terrace to another.
The Farmer puts an Owl in the rice-field; and all the crows come to kill it, and they get caught fast in the snares. This should teach us not to give way to our dislikes for other people. The kites which hover over the city all day do not live in the neighbourhood. Their nests are far away upon the blue peaks; but they pass much of their time in catching fish, and in stealing from back- yards.
The land in this part of Java, though well wooded, is not covered with timber so thickly as the opposite coast of Sumatra; but, here and there, the scene is diversified by a clearing, where the Javanese may be seen at work in his rice-field, yam-patch, vegetable garden, or pinery.
A few men of negro extraction, with white blood in their veins, not any more negro than white man, consequently not negroes in the true sense of the word, are sent from the negro colleges of the south to lecture northern congregations upon the needs of their race; and these one-quarter, or perhaps three-quarters, white men are, with their intelligence, and sometimes brilliant oratory, held up as true types of the negro race by northerners; while there is, in fact, as much difference between the pureblooded negro of the rice-field and this false representative of "his needs," as can well be imagined.
What is that sudden rustling among the leaves? Why are those persons flying from our approach, and hiding themselves in yon darkest thicket? Behold, as we get into the plain, a deserted village! The rice-field has been just trodden down around it. An aged man, venerable by his silver beard, lies wounded and dying near the threshold of his hut.
Some of the early emperors took a personal interest in farming; and in the grounds of the Imperial Palace at Akasaka may even now be seen a little rice-field.
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