natives and Europeans. Here is the Presbyterian mission compound, and on the summit of a neighboring hill is the king's summer palace. The Tavoy road leads through this town. The Laotian captives who built the royal palace are settled in villages all over the Petchaburee valley; "their bamboo huts with tent-like roofs, thatched with long dried grass, rise from the expanse of level plain among fruit and palm trees like green islands in the sea." Each hut has its well-*tilled kitchen-garden, its tobacco- and cotton-plot. The latter, dyed with vegetable and mineral substances, the women weave on their own looms for family use. With the exception of a few Chinese articles, everything about these hamlets is of native make. The Laotian serfs are superior to the Siamese physically, and have more force of character.
The Malay peninsula projects from the Isthmus of Kraw (lat. 10° N.), six or seven hundred miles to Cape Romania, opposite Singapore. If the estuaries between the Pakshan and Chomphon Rivers are ever united by a ship-canal, the peninsula would be put where it ethnically and geographically belongs, as one of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago.
Much of the peninsula is still one of the unexplored portions of the globe. The rich stanniferous granite of the rocky spine running from Kraw Point to the alluvial plain at the south is
