The houses of the nobles and wealthier classes have one room, or more, carpeted with grass matting, which hides the holes above mentioned, and such rooms are pretty well furnished with spittoons, generally dirty beyond description. When the floors are of split bamboo, the ordinary flooring of the poorer classes, one has a clear view of the filth beneath the floor, as the interstices between the slats are many and often large. A peculiar concentration of filthiness is to be found in Siamese bedrooms, especially so if they are occupied by invalids. The sick have little strength or spirit to give attention to the cleanliness of their persons, much less to their bedding, and their relatives are little disposed to care for these things. It is fortunate that their rooms are well ventilated through chinks in the walls, floors, and roofs; and that the continually accumulating filth is quickly dried, and is thus probably deprived of much of its inherent power to engender disease. The missionary stated that, having visited the sick at their homes for twenty-nine years, he might truthfully say he had not seen a clean mattress, pillow, or mosquito-bar oftener than once in twenty visits, and then only among his Christian flock. The bedrooms amongst the masses of the people were generally horribly untidy. Their mattresses and pillows, having never had a sheet or pillow-case put over them, and having been used for months, and sometimes years, without any kind of washing, were generally brown and greasy as smoked bacon. Their mosquito-curtains, which when new were white, looked as if they had been long smoked in a chimney. The unmistakable marks of bed-bugs were thick and black enough to throw a European lady, or even gentleman, into hysterical fits at the sight. The Siamese think it wrong to kill their bugs, so merely take them up tenderly, and drop them into a little cocoa-nut oil, which soon gives them their quietus; or place the infested mats in the sun, so that the unacclimatised pests may die of sunstroke. After such a description of the loathsome habits of the Siamese, it is refreshing to return to the Christian Chow Phya, whom we left squatting on the floor, telling us tales about the country. Before he left, I asked him to draw me a map showing the position of the different streams entering the Meh Wung, from the source of the river to its junction with the Meh Ping. On its completion, he gave me the names of 112 villages lying in the basin of the river, and said there were many more whose names he could not recollect. Fifty-four of these villages lay to the north of the city, and the remainder to the south in the portion of the valley that will be traversed by our proposed railway. Villages containing less than thirty houses were not included in his list.