But to return to the kitchen: it has no chimney, and the smoke finds its way out as best it can, so that nearly everything is black and sooty. There is but little furniture except the fireplace, the rice-pots, a kettle and perhaps a frying-pan, and baskets of various shapes and sizes, one pair being daubed within and without with pitch and used to carry water. There is a little stool, a foot square and six inches high, that they call a table, and on which they place the curry and fish and sliced vegetables, while those who eat squat like toads about it, each having on the floor before him a bowl of rice, which is replenished from a larger dish near by or directly from the rice-pot in the fireplace.
There is no regularity about their meals, and they do not wait for one another, but eat whenever they get hungry. In the higher families the men always eat first and by themselves, and the wives and children and dogs take what is left.
The usual rule is for each one to wash his own rice-bowl and turn it upside down in a basket in the corner of the room, there to drip and dry till the next time it is needed.
They eat with their fingers, very few having even so much as a spoon, and they do not use the wafer-like bread so common in the Levant, which the Syrians double into a kind of three-cornered spoon, and, dipping up some kibby, or camel-stew, or rice, eat down spoon and all.
The kitchen floors are nearly all made of split bamboo, with great cracks between, through which they pour all the slops and push the scraps and bones, so that sweeping is unnecessary. Near the door are several large earthen jars for water, which are filled from the river by the women or servants. Here they wash their feet before they enter the house, and their hands and mouths before and after they eat, dipping the water with a gourd or cocoanut-shell. They use brass basins and trays a great deal, but for lack of scouring they are discolored and green with verdigris; and I cannot help thinking that the use of such vessels is one of the fruitful sources of the fearful sores and eruptions with which the whole nation is afflicted.
SIAMESE LADIES DINING.
There are no washing- or ironing-days. Many wear no upper garment, only a waist-cloth, which they keep on when they go to bathe, and when they come up out of the water they change it for a dry one. It is then rubbed a little in the water, wrung out and spread in the sun to dry. If it is not stolen, they fold it up when it is dry and pat it with their hands, and that is all the ironing they do.
The outer room of the house is barren enough, with perhaps a mat or ox-hide for guests to sit upon, and a tray from which all are served with betel and tobacco. It is considered a great insult not to offer betel to your guests, and a greater one still, I believe, to refuse it when offered. They think the red lips and black teeth it produces are very beautiful. They have a saying, “Any dog can have white teeth,” inferring that only human beings know how to blacken theirs.