You would be very wrong to form your ideas of a house in the Indies according to European notions, and to think of a heap of stones, small rooms piled upon large rooms, with the street before it, neighbours right and left, whose household gods lean against yours, and a little garden with three gooseberry-bushes behind. With a few exceptions, the houses in the Indies have but one storey. The European reader will think this very strange, for it is a peculiarity of civilisation, or what passes for it, to consider strange all that is natural. The Indian houses are quite different from ours, but they are not strange; our houses are strange. He who was the first to allow himself the luxury of not sleeping in the same room with his cows, put the second room of his house not upon, but next to the first, for to build them all on the ground is both more simple and more comfortable. Our high houses owe their origin to want of space: we seek high in the air what we miss on the ground; and so every maid-servant, who in the evening shuts the window of her bed-room under the eaves, is a protest against this crowding, even when she is thinking, what I can readily believe, of something else.
In those countries, also, where civilisation and overcrowding of the population have not yet pushed mankind high up, because of the pressure below, the houses are of one storey, and Havelaar’s did not belong to the few exceptions to this rule. On entering, . . . . but no, I will give a proof that I abandon all claims to the
