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Why do we often come across minds otherwise just enough, which are absolutely false on important things? Why does this same Siamese who will never let himself be cheated when there is question of counting him three rupees, firmly believe in the metamorphoses of Sammonocodom?

Here may be seen, besides Europeans of different nations, and Americans, the Jew, the Armenian, the Persian, the Parsee, the Arab, the Bengalee, the Malabaree, the China-man, the Malay, the Javanese, the Siamese, the Cochin Chinese, with the native of Borneo, of Macassar, and of every island of the Eastern Archipelago; all in the costumes of their respective countries, and forming motley groupes that can nowhere be surpassed.

So idle are they that there would be very little trade in Bankok, if it were not for the Chinese, who come over here in crowds, and make sugar, and buy and sell, and get money to take back to China. You may tell in a moment a Chinaman's garden from a Siamese garden; one is so neat and full of flowers; the other is overgrown with weeds and strewn with litter.

The juggler, a keen little Frenchman, plied his arts nimbly, and what with his ventriloquial doll, his empty bag full of eggs, his stones that were candies, and his candies that were stones, and his stuffed birds that sang, astonished and delighted his unsophisticated patrons, whose applauding murmurs were diversified by familiarly silly shrieks the true Siamese Did-you-ever! from behind the kincob curtains.

When the masons building a wall round the new palace at Ayuthia found their bricks falling short, they tried in vain to detach a supply from the ruined temples and walls of that ancient city. In the art of sculpture the Siamese are in advance of their civilization.

Few men can reason; all can feel. Enthusiasm and full salvation, like the Siamese twins, cannot be separated and live. The error of the modern pulpit is that of the blacksmith hammering cold steel a faint impression and huge labor. The baptism of fire softening our assemblies would lighten the preacher's toil and multiply its productiveness.

It was nothing less than a double Man-Bird lashed together breast to breast by a natural ligament, and labeled with the untranslatable words, "Siamese Twins." The official report concerning this thing closed thus: "Wherefore it appears that there were in old times two distinct species of this majestic fowl, the one being single and the other double. Nature has a reason for all things.

While these thoughts were flashing across our minds, the men kept approaching us, and at length their leader introduced himself as the captain of a Siamese man-of-war. He informed us, in broken English, that he had not long arrived with the Governor of Bangkok, who was proceeding for the rest of the way to Pekin by land.

Pretty soon the troops began to arrive lancers and a battery of artillery and a company of the royal body-guard in red coats and after them came the guests: officials and dignitaries in all sorts of gorgeous uniforms covered with decorations. A few minutes later I heard someone say, 'The King is coming, so I got the camera ready to begin cranking. Just then up comes my Siamese chaperone.

At the far end of this imposing room an enormous, pyramidal shrine of gold rises almost to the roof, its dazzling brilliancy somewhat subdued by the semi-obscurity of the interior. Wat Phra Keo is unique amongst Siamese temples in containing objects of real value.