And all the beautiful earth, and all the drowsy air, and all the soft blue sky invite to sloth and ease and luxury. Therefore I give the greater honor to the earnest men and to the patient women who are laboring and praying for the coming of the Christian day to this benighted people. His majesty, Phrabat Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongkut closed his remarkable career on October 1, 1868, under circumstances of peculiar interest. Amid all the cares and anxieties of government he had never ceased to occupy himself with matters of literary and scientific importance. Questions of scholarship in any one of the languages of which he was more or less master were always able to divert and engage his attention. And the approach of the great solar eclipse in August, 1868, was an event the coming of which he had himself determined by his own reckoning, and for which he waited with an impatience half philosophic and half childish. A special observatory was built for the occasion, and an expedition of extraordinary magnitude and on a scale of great expenditure and pomp was equipped by the king's command to accompany him to the post of observation. A great retinue both of natives and of foreigners, including a French scientific commission, attended his majesty, and were entertained at royal expense. And the eclipse was satisfactorily witnessed to the great delight of the king, whose scientific enthusiasm found abundant expression when his calculation was proved accurate. It was, however, almost his last expedition of any kind. Even before setting out there had been evident signs that his health was breaking. And upon his return it was soon apparent that excitement and fatigue and the malaria of the jungle had wrought upon him with fatal results. He died calmly, preserving to the end that philosophic composure to which his training in the Buddhist priesthood had accustomed him. His private life in his own palace and among his wives and children has been pictured in an entertaining way by Mrs. Leonowens, the English lady whose services he employed as governess to his young children. He had apparently his free share of the faults and vices to which his savage nature and his position as an Oriental despot, with almost unlimited wealth and power, gave easy opportunity. It is therefore all the more remarkable that he should have exhibited such sagacity and firmness in his government, and such scholarly enthusiasm in his devotion to literature and science. Pedantic he seems to us often, and with more or less arrogant conceit of his own ability and acquirements. It is easy to laugh at the queer English which he wrote with such reckless fluency and spoke with such confident volubility. But it is impossible to deny that his reign was, for the kingdom which he governed, the beginning of a new era, and that whatever advance in civilization the country is now making, or shall make, will be largely due to the courage and wisdom and