I, reader, have in my story often left you on the main road, although I was sorely tempted to carry you off into the thicket. I feared that the walk might bore you, as I did not know whether you would derive any pleasure from the flowers or plants I wished to show you. But as this time I believe that afterwards it will give you satisfaction to have seen the path that presently we shall tread, I now feel urged to tell you something about Havelaar’s house.
One would be mistaken if one formed a conception of a house in Java according to European ideas, and imagined a mass of stone with rooms large and small heaped on top of one another, with the street in front, neighbours to the right and left whose lares and penates lean up against our own, and a puny garden behind with three little currant trees. With but few exceptions, the houses in India have no storeys. This may appear strange to the European reader, for it is characteristic of civilization—or what passes as such—to think everything strange that is natural. The Indian houses are entirely different from ours, but it is not they that are strange, it is ours. He that first was able to permit himself the luxury of not sleeping in one room with his cows did not place the second room of his house on top, but by the side of the first, for building on one floor is more simple and also offers more comfort to the occupant. Our high houses were born from the want of space: we sought in the air what could not be found on the earth, and so in reality every servant-girl who of an evening shuts the window of the attic she sleeps in is a living protest against over-population . . . though she herself thinks of something else, I am quite willing to believe.
In countries, therefore, where civilization and over-population have not yet, by compression below, pinched humanity upward, the houses are without storeys, and Havelaar’s did not belong to the rare exceptions to this rule. On entering . . . but no, I will give proof that I relinquish every claim to picturesqueness. Given: an oblong rectangular area which you are asked to divide into twenty-one spaces, three extending from side to side, seven from front to
