During some of the wars between Pegu and Siam, the hostile kings availed themselves of the services of Portuguese, who had begun, by the middle of the sixteenth century, to settle in considerable numbers in both kingdoms. And there are still extant the narratives of several historians, who describe with characteristic pomposity and extravagance, the magnificence of the military operations in which they bore a part. One of these wars seems to have originated in the jealousy of the king of Pegu, who had learned, to his great disgust, that his neighbor of Siam was the fortunate possessor of no less than seven white elephants, and was prospering mightily in consequence. Accordingly he sent an embassy of five hundred persons to request that two of the seven sacred beasts might be transferred as a mark of honor to himself. After some diplomacy the Siamese king declined--not that he loved his neighbor of Pegu less, but that he loved the elephants more, and that the Peguans were (as they had themselves acknowledged) uninstructed in the management of white elephants, and had on a former occasion almost been the death of two of the animals of which they had been the owners, and had been obliged to send them to Siam to save their lives. The king of Pegu, however, was so far from regarding this excuse as satisfactory that he waged furious and victorious war, and carried off not two but four of the white elephants which had been the _casus belli_. It seems to have been in a campaign about this time that, when the king of Siam was disabled by the ignominious flight of the war elephant on which he was mounted, his queen, "clad in the royal robes, with manly spirit fights in her husband's stead, until she expires on her elephant from the loss of an arm." It is related of the illustrious Phra Náret, of whom the royal author, in the passage quoted on a previous page, speaks with so much admiration, that being greatly offended by the perfidious conduct of his neighbor, the king of Cambodia, he bound himself by an oath to wash his feet in the blood of that monarch. "So, immediately on finding himself freed from other enemies, he assailed Cambodia, and besieged the royal city of Lăvĭk, having captured which, he ordered the king to be slain, and his blood having been collected in a golden ewer he washed his feet therein, in the presence of his courtiers, amid the clang of trumpets." The founder of the second dynasty is famous in Siamese history as the king in whose reign was discovered and consecrated the celebrated footstep of Buddha, Phra Bàt, at the base of a famous mountain to the eastward of Ayuthia. Concerning him the late king, in his historical sketch, remarks: