come a full-fledged priest, which is the summit of the fondest parent's wishes.
While a boy is at a wat he is not usually called a scholar or pupil, but a wat-boy—a name which generally implies everything that is naughty. His companions are idle, vicious fellows, fond of cockfighting, swearing and gambling, and he grows up among them bad just in proportion as he is clever and gifted.
The conservative men of Siam are bewailing these latter days, and among other things they aver that wat education is not what it was in the good old times long ago—that then the priests were more strict with their boys, and made them work and study more than they do now. This may be so. But if the men who were educated in the temples years ago, and who should now be the pillars and producers of the country, are to be taken as exponents of what that system of education can do for manhood, then we may safely infer that temple-life was at that time just what it is now—a school of idleness and vice, and those who leave its haunts are fitted only for a lazy, aimless existence. This the natives themselves freely admit, and the time has evidently come when something better is demanded.
While Siam has been doing, perhaps, the best she knew for her sons, her daughters in some respects have been much better off. They are not
