-guard in red coats--and after them came the
guests: officials and dignitaries in all sorts of gorgeous uniforms
covered with decorations. A few minutes later I heard someone say, 'The
King is coming,' so I got the camera ready to begin cranking. Just then
up comes my Siamese chaperone. 'You will have to leave now,' says he.
'Leave? What for?' said I. 'Because the cremation is about to begin,'
he tells me. 'But that's what I've come to take pictures of,' I told
him. 'What did you think that I attended this party for?' 'Oh, no,'
says he, very polite; 'your permission says that you can take pictures
_prior to the cremation_.' So they showed me the gate."

"Then you didn't get any pictures?" I queried, deep disappointment in
my tone.

"Sure, I got the pictures," was the answer. "Some of them, at any rate.
That's what I went there for, wasn't it?"

"But how did you work it?" I demanded.

"Easy," he replied, lighting a cigarette. "I told the driver to back
his car up against the iron fence which encircles the _meru_; then I
set up the camera in the tonneau, so that it was above the heads of the
crowd, screwed on the six-inch lens which I use for long-distance
shots, and took the pictures."

[Illustration: King Sisowath of Cambodia

Though the octogenarian King Sisowath maintains a gorgeous court, he is
permitted only a shadow of power]

[Illustration: Rama VI, King of Siam

He is in most respects the antithesis of the popular conception of an
Oriental monarch]

* * * * *

The present ruler of Siam, King Rama VI, is in most respects the
antithesis of the popular conception of an Oriental monarch. Though
polygamy has been practised among the upper classes in Siam from time
beyond reckoning, he has neither wife nor concubines. Instead of riding
atop a white elephant, in a gilded howdah, or being borne in a
palanquin, as is always the custom of Oriental rulers in fiction, he
shatters the speed laws in a big red Mercedes. For the flaming silks
and flashing jewels which the movies have educated the American public
to believe are habitually worn by Eastern potentates, King Rama
substitutes the uniform of a Siamese general, or, for evening
functions at the palace, the dress coat and knee-breeches of European
courts. He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge and later graduated
from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, being commissioned an
honorary colonel in the British Army. He is the