universality of the custom, it is small wonder that Siam has ten
thousand monasteries and that 300,000 of its inhabitants wear the
ocher-colored robe.

The periods of time which men devote to monastic life are not uniform.
Some spend between a month and a year, others their entire lives. Some
enter the monastery in their youth, others in middle age or when old
men. But they all shave their heads and don the coarse yellow robe and
lead practically the same existence. Each morning, carrying their
"begging bowls," they beg their food at the doors of laymen. They come
quietly and stand at the door, and, accepting the offerings, as quietly
depart without expressing thanks for what is given them, the idea being
that they are not begging for their own benefit but in order to evoke a
spirit of charity in the giver. During the dry season it is the custom
of the monks to make long pilgrimages for the purpose of visiting other
monasteries. Each of these itinerant monks is accompanied by a youth
known as a _yom_, who carries the simple requisites of the journey, the
chief of which is a large umbrella. Traveling in the interior one
frequently meets long files of these yellow-clad pilgrims, with their
attendant _yoms_, moving in silence along a forest trail. When night
comes the _yom_ opens the large umbrella which he carries, thrusts its
long handle into the ground, and over it drapes a square of cloth, thus
extemporizing a sort of tent under which his master sleeps.

* * * * *

To visit Siam without seeing the royal white elephants would be like
visiting Niagara without seeing the falls. The elephant stables stand
in the heart of the palace enclosure, sandwiched in between the palace
gardens and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Each animal--there were
only three in the royal stables at the time of my visit--has a separate
building to itself, within which it stands on a sort of dais, one hind
leg lashed with a rope to a tall, stout post painted scarlet and
surmounted by a gilded crown. Much as I dislike to shatter cherished
illusions, were I to assert that the elephants I saw in the royal
stables were white, I should be convicting myself of color-blindness.
The best that can be said of two of them, is that they were a dirty
gray, about the color of a much-used wash-rag. The third, had it been a
horse, might have been described as a roan, the whole body being a pale
reddish-brown, with a sprinkling o