Page:Siam and Laos, as seen by our American missionaries (1884).pdf/210

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and steel razors. The candle of victory was now extinguished. Still clad in white, our little princess was next carried in procession to the foot of the golden mountain and seated on a marble bench in a pool representing the holy lake Anodad. Here the king took five jars—of gold, silver, brass, bronze and stone—and poured holy water over her. She shivered, and almost cried. But the great princes and princesses, and after them the chief of nobles, came up, and each in turn poured water over the poor child with trying deliberation for nearly half an hour. At last she was permitted to retire to a curtained pavilion near and exchange her drenched robes of white for the rich apparel of royalty. The prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs, gorgeously clad as angels, escorted her now up the golden mountain. At the summit an aged uncle of the king and her royal father himself received her. In the pretty temple there she was invested with a crown of solid gold, and then descended in full royal state covered with jewels, and was carried in procession thrice round the mountain, her right hand toward it.

But, lo! a marvelous transformation in the appearance of the procession had now taken place. The angels that had been clad in white now assumed pink or rose tints; the ladies of the palace had golden-colored scarfs instead of silver, and the pretty children that came in white were