Page:Siam and Laos, as seen by our American missionaries (1884).pdf/240

 crowd of similar elegant boats with the princes and nobles. These boats hover near in clusters of sevens or fives or threes, and after them others, till there is a train of eighty or a hundred boats, containing perhaps four thousand men. All this is a splendid sight, but the Christian beholder is pained by the thought that the display is to do honor to a false religion and a false god.

While the kings are thus engaged the common people in city and country are visiting their favorite temples and priests. Families unite, and groups of boats may be seen filled with young men and maidens in their gayest attire, while the air resounds with Siamese instrumental music and the merry shouts of the boatmen as they convey their presents of priests' robes, fruit and flowers to the temple.

The visitation of the temples over, the ''Taut Katin'' ceremonies wind up with a repetition for three evenings of fireworks much the same as already described.

Superstition and the worship of idols enter not only into the holidays of the Siamese, but into everything they do. "They praise the gods of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand their breath is, and whose are all their ways, they have not glorified;" "Happy is that people whose God is the Lord."