all persons who are to receive consideration for the position should be right-minded and possessed of a comprehensive faculty enabling them to some extent to learn what they will have to know, I next consider it indispensable that we should, with some degree of confidence, be able to expect from them the avoidance of presumptuous pedantry at the outset, and particularly of the apathetic sleepiness that so often accompanies the concluding years of their administration. I have already referred to the fact that Havelaar, in his difficult duty, hoped to be able to rely on the support of the Governor-General, and I added that this hope was naive. That Governor-General was already expecting his successor: his peaceful retirement to Holland was at hand!
We shall see what consequences this tendency to sleepiness brought to the division of Lebak, to Havelaar, and to the Javanese Saïdyah, whose monotonous story, one of many! I shall presently relate.
Yes, monotonous it will be! Monotonous as the account of the drudgery of the ant that has to drag its contribution to the winter store to the top of a lump of earth, a mountain to the little insect, which lies on the way to the storehouse. Time upon time it falls back with its load, and every time tries again whether at last it can solidly plant its feet on the small stone up there . . . on the rock that crowns the mountain. But between it and that summit there is a precipice that has to be negotiated . . . a depth which not a thousand ants would fill. For this purpose the tiny creature, with scarcely the strength to drag along its load on level ground, a load many times heavier than its own body, has to raise that load above its head, and keep itself upright on a movable spot. It must keep its balance when rising upright with its load between its forefeet. It must swing the load upward slantwise, in order to allow it to come down on the point that juts out from the wall of the rock. It totters, staggers, starts, succumbs . . . tries to uphold itself by the half-uprooted tree whose crown points to the depth—a grass-blade!—it misses the footing it seeks: the tree swings back
