Many Siamese men have several wives at a time, but they do not marry all in the same way. They pay a sum of money for each, but often all ceremony is laid aside after the first marriage, save paying the money. They build a little house for each, or assign her a small suite of rooms in the mansion, if men of wealth and position. Polygamy is not so common among the lower as among the higher classes, because of inability to support more than one wife at a time; but a wife can be put away or left at will. Notwithstanding these evils, I have known many homes among the Siamese where the “heart of the husband safely trusted in the wife,” and she, with loving confidence in him, “looked well to the ways of her household.” CHAPTER VIII. _HOUSEKEEPING IN SIAM._ All ordinary Siamese houses must have three rooms. Indeed, so important is this considered that the suitor must often promise to furnish the requisite number before the parents will consent to let him claim his bride. There is the bedroom, where the family all huddle together at night; an outer room, where they sit through the day and where they receive visitors; and the kitchen. I will begin at the latter and try to describe the dirty, dingy place. The Siamese have no godliness, and the next thing to it, cleanliness, is entirely lacking. So please step carefully or you may soil your clothes against a black rice-pot or come in contact with drying fish. There is usually a rude box filled with earth where they build the fire and do what they call the cooking; that is, they boil rice and make curry and roast fish and plantains over the coals. All in the household are taught to do these simple things, and the father and the brothers, if they are at home, in poor families, where the women work for the living, are just as apt to get them ready as the women. There is no making of bread or pie or cake or pudding――no roast, no gravies, no soups. Even vegetables are seldom cooked at home, but are prepared by others and sold in the markets or peddled about the streets. There they buy boiled sweet potatoes and green corn, and stewed fruits and curries, and roasted fish, and nuts and peanuts and bananas, sliced pineapple, melon and squash; and pickled onions and turnips are sold through the streets of Bangkok and Petchaburee just as pickled beets are in Damascus.