... des vrais cochons; Nom de Dicu!" HAT is the end of what our Breton

T

captain said about his deck passengers-Chinese, Annamite, Cambodian-before we left the harbor of Saigon on what appeared to be a wild attempt to reach, in the off season, those mighty ruins of Angkor-four hundred miles to the north-which lay lost through the centuries in the forests of Siam and have been taken over recently by the French. There were four in our party-"des Américains vraiment fous," as we happened to overhear; and our troubles had commenced some days earlier when we had been careless enough to arrive in the torrid capital of Cochin-China at an hour when the Chinese concierge of the hotel was taking his siesta and left us, by consequence, to land with our baggage in the midst of a mob of natives in loin cloths who were fluent enough in their own language and totally ignorant of any other.

But when at last the concierge arose, rotund and smiling, from his slumbers to tell us that the service to Angkor had been suddenly suspended three days before and would not be resumed until after the next season's rains, gloom enwrapped us. We decided, faute de

BY LOUIS V. LEDOUX

micur, to push on as far as PhnomPenh, the capital of Cambodia, which could be reached easily by steamer up the lower Mekhong, and make further inquiries there.

The next day was passed in a fruitless quest for further information, but in the evening we were delighted to learn that a friend of the hotel proprietor's could arrange to have us motored from PhnomPenh to the village of Kompong-Luong des Lacs, from which we could make in seven hours a diagonal of seventy-five miles across the end of the great lake in a Government motor boat which could be rented for us.

On the following evening the steamer of the Breton captain was scheduled to leave for Phnom-Penh at nine, and while the men of our party were seeing off the baggage and the two ladies finishing their after-dinner chicory, the proprietor led up to our table a French woman whom we will call for the sake of brevity simply "Madame," and explained that the lady was another particular friend of his who, having lived in Saigon for fifteen years without ever visiting Angkor, had decided to take this excellent opportunity and come with us. There was no help for it and she came.

That evening on the boat while our ladies were getting ready for bed my friend and I sat out on deck in our pajamas, while Madame, who would have been a model for Rubens, undressed in candle-light with her door open, and then paraded about us, as she did again the next morning, in transparent scarlet chiffon and curl-papers. Finally it came our turn to go to bed, but none of the four could sleep until Madame, on the other side of a thin partition, had finished explaining exhaustively to her colonial compatriots that all Americans were mad, anyway, and that she had decided to come with us only so as to spite her husband-facts that we were interested to learn.