From the knees to the waist, his dress suggested the East. Starting from the frontier formed by his belt, the West resumed its rights and set the fashion of the day before yesterday! His feet were clad in shoes resembling a bishop's, with broad, flat buckles, whence rose two spindle-shanks confined in black silk stockings and ending in a queer pair of breeches of a thin, silky, copper-coloured material, something midway between a cyclist's knickerbockers and a woman's petticoat and known as the _sampot_, the national dress of Cambodia. Over these breeches of uncertain cut fell the graceless tails of an eighteenth-century dress-coat, opening over a shirt-front crossed by the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour. Lastly, this astonishing get-up was topped with a rusty tall hat, dating back to the year 1830, which crowned the monarch's head. All this made him look like a carnival-reveller who had come fresh from a fancy-dress ball. Nevertheless, he took himself very seriously; and the French government treated him with every consideration, for he represented a valuable asset in the exercise of our protectorate over Cambodia. Those acquainted with the traditions of the Cambodian court will know that, in consenting to leave his realms for a time in order to go to France, he had broken every religious and political law. To appease the just wrath of Buddha and relieve his own conscience, before leaving his capital, Pnom-Penh, he had sent magnificent offerings to the tombs of the KneKne kings, bathed in lustral water prepared by the prayers of sixty-seven bonzes, invoked the emerald statue of the god Berdika and accepted at the hands of the chief Brahmin a leaf of scented amber, by way of a lucky charm. It was really impossible to surround himself with more potent safeguards and he had every reason to be in a good humour, although he had flown into a great rage on the passage at seeing his suite abandoning themselves to the tortures of sea-sickness: "I forbid you to be sick!" he shouted to them. "Those are my orders: am I the King or am I not?" Distracted by the impossibility of obeying, they took refuge in the depths of the steamer and did not reappear on deck until the ship approached the Straits of Messina. And the saddened sovereign was made to realise for the first time that he was not omnipotent. The fact made so great an impression on his mind that, from that time forward, he became excessively and almost inconveniently polite. He shook hands with everybody he saw, beginning with the flunkeys at the Marseilles Prefecture, who lined the staircase as he went upstairs. 2.