The original city of Bangkok is surrounded by a high thick wall pierced with many gates that are never closed. The principal entrance is the one known as "The Three-Headed Gate", so called on account of the three tapering spires that surmount the three openings. By far the larger portion of the population lives outside the wall, but as the Royal Palace and nearly all the Government buildings are within its circumference, it encloses everything that is of importance to the native as far as government is concerned. The roads in the city are excellent, and in the neighbourhood of the palace itself there are a number of wide open green spaces that would not discredit any city of Europe. The palace is enclosed by several rows of departmental offices, outside of which is a high white wall. Day closes with a rapidity equal to that with which it dawns, there being no long spell of twilight either in the morning or the evening. In the principal streets, the electric light has displaced the small old oil lamps that at one time formed the only evening illumination known to the people, but on the outskirts of the city the lamplighter still wends his evening round, carrying the small ladder, boxes of matches, and bottles of oil, that mark the nature of his occupation. The oil lamps are placed at more or less irregular intervals, and are soon blown out by any wind of moderate strength. Little cholera lamps swung aloft at the ends of long slender poles, sway backwards and forwards, telling where the grim fiend has entered in his work of destruction. The Chinese light their smoky tallow candles and place them in large quaint lanterns bearing mystic signs and symbols; while round the city wall itself, the cocoa-nut oil lamps burn with a lurid glare, sending forth at the same time dense clouds of yellow pungent smoke. [Illustration: A GHARRY.] In the absence of drunken men and women and the scarcity of women of ill-fame, the streets of Bangkok might well serve as a model for some of the wealthier and more handsome towns of Europe. There is one thing to be regretted in connection with the improvements that are daily being made in the capital, and that is the gradual effacement of all traces of native design or workmanship. Bridges, houses and railway stations are mostly of a distinctly European type, and that type one of uncompromising ugliness. The new streets of Bangkok, if cleaner and sweeter than the old, have nothing of the curious charm of those they have replaced, and are merely excellent examples of unadulterated brick and mortar unrelieved by the faintest trace of anything that could possibly be described as artistic. CHAPTER II. BY "KHLONG" AND RIVER.