Preface.
During many leisure hours, while absent amid the sunny glades and emerald values of Asia's most favored kingdom, Siam, I made numerous notes concerning that land of mystic lore and ruined fanes, a section novel to all who have been so fortunate as to have visited its walled city its hundred glittering spires, whose temples and palaces are marvels of architectural beauty, whose wide-spreading rice-fields feed untold millions, its groves of waving palms ever ready to minister to man's wants, its rivers and canals plethoric with fish, its fruits and flowers lavishly luxuriant, an Eden of loveliness, the land of the lotus. To the general reader Siam is a terra incognita; much has been written concerning it by superficial observers, who came on one steamer and left on the next. What has been gathered for this volume has been carefully condensed and concisely told. It was my intention when appointed Minister to the Court at Bangkok, by President Cleveland, to prepare a work on this faraway and marvelous land that might prove of interest to many who may desire to know something of a people that live under a supreme monarch and follow the teaching of Buddha, and in doing so I have endeavored to hold the mirror up to nature, in fact, to "tell the truth."
