As we pass the different towns and villages we stop as necessity requires to replenish our larder in the line of rice, vegetables, fruit, fish or chickens. Flour, coffee, tea, sugar, etc. we provided in Bangkok for the whole trip. The flour comes from America. When we bake bread it is always in the evening. We got leaven from the friends in Bangkok, and hold it in safe-keeping, lest we run short midway in our journey. When the boat stops for the night we have our loaves already risen in the pans, and our first care is a fire for its immediate baking. The houses in these towns are scattered without regularity of streets or squares. Slight bamboo fences mark the boundaries of each house and garden. The enclosed space may be large, as in case of a nobleman’s residence, or very small or maybe none at all in that of a poor peasant. The houses are built of bamboo, and are raised on posts. The roofs are covered with attap (a broad-leaved grass resembling blades of corn). Costlier and larger houses are made of teak-wood, raised also on posts and the roofs covered with tiles. Not a brick house or a chimney is to be seen anywhere. At a distance the appearance of a town is strongly suggestive of barns and haystacks. In contrast with these rude domiciles we find in the vicinity of every town large and elaborately finished temples. Upon them the wealth and taste of the community are concentrated. They are built of brick and plastered with white cement, which gleams like marble through the heavy, dark foliage of the trees in the temple-grounds. Wood-carvings and gold-leaf and mosaics of colored glasses or isinglass wrought into many devices decorate the front entrance and doorway. Standing apart, they have a domain of their own. Their broad grounds are enclosed by a brick fence covered with white cement. In proximity to the temple are the numerous little houses of the priests, whom we can see, at all hours and in all places, marching about in dress of bright yellow and with bald, shaven heads. The shady seclusion of these grounds, with the images of Buddha sitting in darkness within the temple, and it being also the abode of the priesthood, make it a place of great sanctity and veneration to these superstitious people. The same uniformity presents itself in every hamlet and town in our route. Between these places miles and miles of solitary silence stretch away, until we could readily imagine that all of human kind had forsaken the earth, and that we, by some strange destiny, were left in this big “basket of bulrushes” to go on and on interminably. What wonder, then, that the sight of a town or a passing boat are pleasant interruptions on this monotonous highway?