The houses are built on poles for two reasons; first, to avoid the floods during the rainy season, and secondly, to prevent the intrusion of the wild beasts who roam about at nights in the more remote parts of the country. There is no second storey, but a platform or verandah runs along the front or even round the whole of the house. The ascent to this verandah, or to the front door in the absence of one, is made by means of a rickety ladder constructed of the indispensable bamboo. [Illustration: A SIAMESE TEAK-WOOD HOUSE.] The house is divided into at least three rooms, a kitchen, a drawing-room and a bedroom. So powerful is the superstition that even numbers are unlucky, that the number of rooms is always an odd one. The same fancy regulates also the number of windows and doors, and even the rungs of the ladder. Of these rooms the least dirty is the one we have designated the drawing-room. The kitchen is always remarkable for its accumulation of dirt and rubbish. A properly constructed fireplace is of course impossible in a wooden house. A substitute for grate and oven is obtained in one of two ways. A wooden box is filled with earth, and a couple of bricks are placed thereon. The fire, which is of wood or charcoal, is laid between the bricks, and the pot, pan, or kettle is supported by them. A more civilised form of stove is an earthenware furnace. It resembles in shape a short narrow pail, containing a shelf midway, pierced by a number of round holes. Below the shelf an oblong aperture is cut in the side of the pail. The pot stands on the rim of the bucket, the charcoal is placed on the sieve-like shelf, and a current of air is caused to pass upwards by rapidly waving a fan to and fro in front of the lateral opening. No chimney or other method of exit is provided in the kitchen by which the smoke of the fire can escape. It finds its way to the exterior or into the other rooms of the house, through the holes in the walls or through the light frame-work screens and partitions that represent walls. Grime and soot accumulate year after year, and form a very complete if inartistic covering to the sides and roof of this Oriental kitchen. The place is never cleaned out or disinfected. Spiders spin their webs in undisturbed possession of every nook; tiny lizards crawl over the walls, open-mouthed, looking for flies and mosquitoes; multitudes of insects of the "crawly creepy" kind find comfortable breeding-places amidst the shreds of smoke-stained attap.