"All ordinary Siamese houses must have three rooms; indeed, so important is this number considered to the comfort of the family, that the suitor must often promise to provide three rooms ere the parents will let him claim his bride. There is the common bedroom, an outer room where they sit during the day and receive their visitors, and the kitchen. Let me begin at the latter and try to describe the dirty, dingy place. Having no godliness, the next thing to it, cleanliness, is entirely lacking. There is 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 bananas over the coals. There is no making of bread or pie, of cake or pudding; no roasts, no gravies, no soups. Even vegetables are seldom cooked at home, but are prepared by others and sold in the markets, or peddled in the streets. There they buy boiled sweet potatoes, green corn, and preserved fruits, curries, roasted fish, and ants, peanuts, and bananas, sliced pineapples, and melons, and squash. Pickled onions and turnips are sold in the streets of Bangkok just as pickled beets are in Damascus. Curry is made of all sorts of things, but is usually a combination of meat or fish, and vegetables. If you want an English name for it that all can understand, you must call it a stew. The ingredients are chopped very fine or pounded in a mortar, especially the red peppers, onions, and spices. The pre-dominant flavor is red pepper, so hot and fiery that your mouth will smart and burn for half an hour after you have eaten it. Still many of the curries are very good, and with steamed rice furnish a good meal. But sometimes a 'broth of abominable things is in their vessels,' as for instance, when they make curry of rats or bats, or of the flesh of animals that have died of disease, and they flavor it with _kapick_, a sort of rotten fish, of which all Siamese are inordinately fond. It is unrivalled in strength of fragrance and flavor. Siam is unique in that she possesses two of the most abominable things, and yet the most delicious, if we believe what we hear, and they are the durian, a large fruit found only on this peninsula, and 'kapick,' which I hope is not found anywhere outside of Siam. "There is no regularity about their meals, and they do not wait for one another, but eat when they get hungry. In the higher families the men always eat first and by themselves, and the wives and children and dogs take what is left. The usual rule is for each one to wash his own rice-bowl, and turn it upside down in a basket in a corner of the kitchen, there to drip and dry till the next time it is needed. They eat with their fingers, very few having so much even as a spoon. [Illustration: SIAMESE LADIES AT DINNER.]