When the king pays his annual visit to the royal wats, on entering the temple he takes off his shoes, then, lifting his hands containing the offerings above his head, he bows low before the image of Buddha. He concludes by making similar obeisance to the superior priests and bestowing the customary gifts. The chief priests and monks sit unmoved during the ceremony. No one can be long in Siam without being astonished at the large part which the wat occupies as a social centre in the every-day life of the people. The Siamese traveler rests in the salas. You meet a Siamese woman and ask where she is going; the probability is she is on her road to some temple to make merit with her offerings or by listening to preaching. Go to the priests’ quarters, and you find there not only a large proportion of the fathers, brothers and older sons, but mere children of seven and eight years old. The bodies of the dead are carried there to be burned. The people also frequently meet together at the different temples to make feasts and give presents to their priests. The wats outside of Bangkok, though the buildings are generally of cheaper construction, occupy delightful sites and have extensive grounds. Dr. McFarland, going to Petchaburee, stopped at the sala of a country wat. “We found the grounds,” he says, “crowded with men and boys in great excitement, evidently awaiting some unusual occurrence. Presently boats began to arrive and unload their treasures of fruit and depart, perhaps for more. Before our company had all finished their breakfast we found it difficult to keep our place at the landing. We were told that this was a _lakon_. This immense gathering of fruits and other offerings is presented with ceremonies of music and dancing to their god, and afterward the priests stow it away and feast upon it for many days to come. Thus spending the day in amusement, at the same time they make merit for the future. Some things in this heathen ceremony reminded the missionary of the county fairs he had attended in the West, crowds of people――men, women and children――in their richest apparel, bringing their choicest fruit and most valuable articles, but not for exhibition; they come to spend the day in frolic and offer their fruits to a heathen deity.” The Siamese wat embodies “a theory which extracted and remodeled the best ideas of ancient Brahmanism――a religion that has not only been able to subsist for more than two thousand years, but which has drawn within the meshes of its own peculiar church organization, and brought more or less under the influence of its peculiar tenets, fully one-third of the human race. Such a system ought to have enough importance in our eyes to deserve something more than passing or passive attention.”