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The common people, such is their passion for the drama, get whole tragedies or comedies "by heart." Every day in the year, and in every street of Bangkok, and all along the river, booths and floating salas may be seen, in which tragedy, comedy, and satirical burlesques, are enacted for the entertainment of great audiences, who are thrilled, delighted, or amused.
The smells of the room did not seem as acrid as a fully evaporated area over a recent urine-saturated pavement near a park or stadium in Bangkok or as repugnant as a room littered with his brothers fetid socks and other equally if not more reprehensible articles of attire peeled off the bodies of these anathemas but still, as small as the room was, nothing was impervious to it.
Jinrikishas are used in Bangkok, but with foreigners carriages are preferred. The native street, called Sampeng, is really a Chinese-Siamese combination, and might be termed a bazar on the order of those visited in previous cities.
Nor, upon my arrival at the hotel there is only one in Bangkok deserving of the name did I expect to find on the breakfast table a breakfast food manufactured in Battle Creek, or beside my bed an electric fan made in New Britain, Connecticut, or behind the desk a very wide awake American youth the son, I learned later, of one of the American advisers to the Siamese Government who eagerly inquired whether I had brought any American newspapers with me and whether I thought the pennant would be won by the Giants or the White Sox.
The government expended not less than a hundred thousand dollars on this scientific expedition, and a delegation from the foreign community of Bangkok approached his Majesty with an address of thanks for his indiscriminate hospitality. But the extraordinary excitement, and exposure to the noxious atmosphere of the jungle, proved inimical to the constitution of the king.
Ban Pa In is on an island in the Menam River. One handsome palace is in the European style, and another is of a pure Chinese pattern. There is a modern temple of Gothic style, built fifteen years ago. Near the palace a tower affords a fine view. We arrived at Bangkok late in the afternoon, feeling well pleased with our day's excursion.
"Bangkok?" asked the priest. He was directing his question to Michael. "She went there once," he told the priest. "She is always making contrasts of Thailand to Western civilization." "Did she meet this black man there?" "Who knows?" said Michael. Gabriele guffawed. "Why not address me?" she asked. "Then answer for yourself, you disgusting tramp," said Michael.
There were several large islands along the coast of Cambodia; but the course was fifty miles outside of the mainland, which could not be seen. "Why do you keep so far from the shore, Captain Scott?" asked Louis; for all the party would have been glad to observe the shore. "Because we all wish to get to Bangkok to-morrow evening. What is the shortest way between two points, Louis?"
At Batavia we would have no difficulty in getting a steamer for Singapore, and from there we could go overland by the new Federated Malay States Railway, through Johore and Malacca and Kuala Lumpur, to Siam, where the cats and the twins and the white elephants come from. From Bangkok we might take a short-cut through the Cambodian jungle, by elephant, to Pnom-Penh and "
Here he indulged freely, and on an imposing scale, in his favorite pastime of hunting, and privately took to wife the daughter of the king of Chiengmai, the Princess Sunartha Vismita. And here he was happy, only returning to Bangkok when called thither by affairs of state, or to take the semi-annual oath of allegiance.
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