We spared no labour to reach the homes of these people, or their hearts. We tried to become Mūsôs to the Mūsôs that we might win them. Sometimes we had to sleep in their huts—on a floor raised two or three feet from the ground, which the dogs shared with the family, while the pigs and goats were on the ground beneath. In the centre was a raised fireplace on which the native teapot always boiled. Sleeping-mats or thin bedding lay about on the floor, and on this, before bedtime, some of the inmates would lie down and fall asleep even while listening to the conversation.—But everywhere the tribal bond was too strong to be broken. [Illustration: MŪSÔ PEOPLE AND HUT NEAR CHIENG RAI] By this time the rains had set in. The trails—and the leeches that infested them—were getting worse and worse. Soon the torrent-streams would become impassable. We must return while yet we could. Our six weeks’ wanderings we retraced in four days of constant tramping. It had been a hard trip for all of us. I myself had a touch of fever. It seemed good on reaching our camp to have once more the luxury of a chair and a table. And then to be on the sadaw’s back travelling homewards, and to meet a good mail on the way! My three-score and fourth birthday was spent in the forest, and I reached home safely on the 18th of May, after an absence of nearly five months. * * * * * The peninsula of Farther India is largely exempt from the terrible scourge of famine which has become almost chronic in Hindustan, its greater neighbour on the west. There the population is so numerous that the normal production of food is just sufficient to supply its needs. Even a local or a partial failure of the crops must produce distress. Siam, on the contrary, is happy in that it not only produces an abundant supply for its own people, but is a granary for the surrounding countries. The worst that has ever been experienced in Lower Siam in years of greatest scarcity, has been the necessity of checking the export of rice. The annual floods there cover the whole country, so that a general failure of crops is, humanly speaking, impossible.