These Animals
Require An Immense Deal Of Driving To Get Them On At All; A
Continual Shower Of Exclamations Is Kept Up At Them, And "Oh!
Ah!
Gee!
Ugh!" are to be heard in various keys and in an uninterrupted
succession all day long. At night we were favoured with a different
kind of concert. The dry ground around my house had become a marsh
tenanted by frogs, who kept up a most incredible noise from dusk to
dawn. They were somewhat musical too, having a deep vibrating note
which at times closely resembles the tuning of two or three bass-viols
in an orchestra. In Malacca and Borneo I had heard no such sounds as
these, which indicates that the frogs, like most of the animals of
Celebes, are of species peculiar to it.
My kind friend and landlord, Mr. Mesman, was a good specimen of
the Macassar-born Dutchman. He was about thirty-five years of
age, had a large family, and lived in a spacious house near the
town, situated in the midst of a grove of fruit trees, and
surrounded by a perfect labyrinth of offices, stables, and native
cottages occupied by his numerous servants, slaves, or
dependants. He usually rose before the sun, and after a cup of
coffee looked after his servants, horses, and dogs, until seven,
when a substantial breakfast of rice and meat was ready in a cool
verandah. Putting on a clean white linen suit, he then (trove to
town in his buggy, where he had an office, with two or three
Chinese clerks who looked after his affairs. His business was
that of a coffee and opium merchant. He had a coffee estate at
Bontyne, and a small prau which traded to the Eastern islands
near New Guinea, for mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell. About one
he would return home, have coffee and cake or fried plantain,
first changing his dress for a coloured cotton shirt and trousers
and bare feet, and then take a siesta with a book. About four,
after a cup of tea, he would walk round his premises, and
generally stroll down to Mamajam to pay me a visit, and look
after his farm.
This consisted of a coffee plantation and an orchard of fruit
trees, a dozen horses and a score of cattle, with a small village
of Timorese slaves and Macassar servants. One family looked after
the cattle and supplied the house with milk, bringing me also a
large glassful every morning, one of my greatest luxuries. Others
had charge of the horses, which were brought in every afternoon
and fed with cut grass. Others had to cut grass for their
master's horses at Macassar - not a very easy task in the dry
season, when all the country looks like baked mud; or in the
rainy season, when miles in every direction are flooded. How they
managed it was a mystery to me, but they know grass must be had,
and they get it.
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