One day, it being the Siamese Sâbâto (Sabbath), I called at her house on my way home. In passing into the little room that she had fitted up to receive me, and which we had dignified with the title of "the study," I saw that my friend, in the room adjoining, was at prayer, kneeling before her altar, on which was a gilt image of the Buddha, while on either side hung pictures of the king and her little son. The room in which she knelt was a gay one, covered with Birmese paper, on which were seen huge trees, some standing, and others uprooted and carried away by the inundation of a mighty tropical river, here and there drifting along passive and lifeless, and anon covered with gay flowers. Thousands of miles distant the sun left open his golden gates, that his waves of light might rest in benediction and with protecting fondness on her dark, upturned face and colored brow. There was a mysterious joy in her worship, which transfigured by its soft inner light her otherwise not beautiful face, and she seemed as if she were holding direct communion in her inner soul with the Infinite Spirit. I stepped into the study and waited until her prayer was offered up. In a little time after I heard her clear voice calling me, and in another moment I was seated beside her at the foot of her pretty little altar. She then asked me to look at her paper, which I did, telling her that I thought it was a very gay one indeed for her little oratory. "I see you do not understand the meaning of it." And she proceeded to explain the allegory to me in her quaint and broken English. "That big green tree there," said she, "is like unto me when I was young and ignorant, rejoicing in earthly distinctions and affections; and then I am brought as a gift to a great king, and only think how grand and how rich I may become; and there you see that I am drooping and my leaves are all withering and begin to fall; here I am shattered and uprooted by a sense of sorrow and humiliation, drifting along an impetuous river, but by and by a little flower stops my downward course. That little flower is my child; he springs out of the very waters which threatened my destruction; and now he grows into a garden of flowers, to hide away from me that which would make me sad and sorrowful again; and now I am always glad." After a little while, desirous of knowing what the glittering image of Buddha really was to her, I said kindly: "Sonn Klean, you were praying to that idol?" She did not reply at once, but at length, laying her hand gently upon my arm, said: "Shall I say of you, dear friend, that you worship the ideal or image which you have of your God in your own mind, and not the God? Even so say not of me that I worship the golden image up there, but the Great One who sent me my teacher Buddha, that he might be the guide and the light of my life."