I cannot help looking back to those early days spent in with a longing which amounts to nostalgia, for the place which seemed a fairyland to a youth in his twenties has acquired a halo to the man in his seventies. To a young man interested in nature it was then about the loveliest spot on the entire globe—a fairyland in which the quiet-voiced Javanese came and went softly. You did not hear their bare feet on the roadways; their costumes were the colors of autumn leaves that faded into the landscape; their meals of rice and fish and many kinds of vegetables were eaten noiselessly from wooden bowls, without a clatter of china; their thatched houses of bamboo seemed like playthings scattered picturesquely under the and trees in the tiny s; and the voices of children playing with crickets on the clean-swept dooryards mingled with the cooing of the in bamboo cages which hung from the overarching tips of bamboo poles beside the .
— DAVID FAIRCHILD