The Mongolian natives here are modest-nice for hot climate people.
The females wear loose gauze habits, protecting from the neck to the bare toes.
It is amusing to see a group of these ladies on an afternoon outing, riding in a wooden cart drawn by one lazy ox. I have often felt like patting both the ox and the ladies.
Paddy fish come ashore here in great schools, flopping into and damaging the gardens and rice fields.
In the park they have on exhibition a sacred elephant, which they claim saved the life of one of their kings more than one thousand years ago. He is really covered with moss, apparently blind and quite feeble. This is the home of the spotted fawn, of which their babies seem so dear.
In Siam the women and the men wear only a breach cloth. Both sexes wear their hair cut short, so it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Monkeys here are as tame as robins at home, and lizards two feet long crawl over one's bed, but they do not bite.
Of the nineteen million inhabitants over one million are priests. It takes three hundred of them to do the praying in the one temple here in Bangkok. This is where the eagles, three feet tall, gather from the mountains to devour the bodies of the dead who had not left money enough to pay the priests for the cremation ceremony.
The present king has five hundred wives, seventy-five sons and seven white elephants on his hands, and yet he is not happy. It was from here that General Grant went into the forest to see wild elephants. The herds are not feeding here now, so with two French tourists I have stopped over at Tringano, on the west coast of the Gulf of Siam.