Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 January 1894 — IN THE DREAM CITY. [ARTICLE]

IN THE DREAM CITY.

The Little People Frem Java. 7 —~ ' x ■ ■ ‘ —- —■ W. A. Rogers la St. Nicholas. In the great Dream City that stood last summer by the blue waters of Lake Michigan, there were as many as 50,000 inhabitants. To the visitdr they seemed to be a part of the scene; but to the inhabitant the visitors were the fleeting show, and he came to know and to like or dislike his neighbors as their manners or his fancy gave him cause. Near the part of the city where 1 lived was a district inhabited by tW little people from Java. Their streets were so clean, their houses so pretty, and they looked out on the stranger with such cheerful, timid smiles,that they soon won the hearts of their neighbors, and their coffee-house came to be a favorite gatheringplace. When I first visited their streets, I inquired of a bright little woman who sat before a tiny loom on the portico-of her house whether she spoke English. She replied quickly: “&a, na; no spik Inglis—all spik Chicago nax week;’’ and “then the little woman went on weaving a sarong, meanwhile singing softly tc herself. A sarong is a piece of batik, or cotton cloth, about three feet wide by six feet long. It is used by the Javanese men and women as a kind of shirt, being folded about the hips and tucked in under a belt. But weaving a batik is only a small part of the work of making a sarong. Under another wide portico a patient, skillful woman sat drawing the most beautiful designs on the white cloth.

First she made a border exactly like a backgammon board at each end of the cloth; then an inner strip of fantastic pictures of birds flying and spreading their wings, and thgn a maze of lines that seemed to get all tangled up, yet all came out in regular figure in the end, just as the riders do at the circus when they all canter out dressed as seventeenthcentury cavaliers. The pencil with which this design was drawn should not, perhaps, be called a pencil at all—it is very different from the ones St. Nicholas’s artists use; it is a tiny bowl, about as big as an acorn, with a little curved spout, and is fastened on the end of a short bamboo handle. The bowl is filled with hot wax, which the woman keeps melting in a copier vessel over a charcoal fire. ' livery moment or two she dips the jowl in the vessel of wax, then slows in the spout, and draws a few ines before the wax cools. When the design is complete the cloth is dipped in dyes, and when drf is washed in hot water. Then all the wax lines come off, leaving a white figure wherever they were traced, for the dye can not get through the wax. The most fantastic sarongs* are made for the dancing-girls of the Royal Theater of the Sultan of Solo. For them, too, the young Javanese girls embroider velvet bodices with gorgeous figures in colored silks.