crushed, and the crackling noise would be a signal for the man at the rope to cut it, letting the gate close.

We waited long that night; finally, the old elephant catcher himself came back, saying that there had not been enough firecrackers and torches to stampede the elephants, but that his men had them tightly closed in with a circle of fires, from which they could not escape, and tomorrow night-then!

A WITCH DOCTOR WRECKS THE DRIVE

The next night came. Again we took our places; again the breathless stillness. And now, nearer and nearer came the noise of the beaters. A great angry trumpeting, a shrill squeal, the sound of great bodies crashing through brush. The elephants were near, very near.

"S-h-h!" we whispered to our excited boys. We scarcely dared stir for fear the elephants would locate the kraal in front of them by some sound from us.

At that moment, to our horror and astonishment, a light appeared at the door of the platform just across the kraal from us, a platform raised high above the kraal and close to its wall, as was ours. "What in blazes could that be?" We cursed under our breaths. More noise from the elephants coming toward the kraal. Singing, and the light across the way began to dance about!

Louder and louder the man carrying this light sang. Surely he would scare away the herd. Now, pandemonium from the elephants. Shouts, gunshots, yells from the beaters. Then a great crashingand the noise of the elephants died away

in the distance.

Later, once more the old elephant master returned, with the sad news this time that the herd had broken through the line. nearly killed one man, and was in full flight, miles away by now.

The drive had failed.

We were filled with wrath at the singer and light-swinger. He had scared away the elephants, we declared loudly. But this, we were told, was impossible. The singer had been the witch doctor, praying and chanting to overcome the evil spirits of the kraal, so that the elephants would surely enter!!!

And the witch doctor blamed the failure on us. He said a camera platform we had

built had made the spirits angry, and that they had driven the elephants away.

For eight months after this Schoedsack and I continued our work with elephants, other wild beasts, and natives; and it was due only to the kind aid given us by Prince Yugala, Prince Damrong, and others of the Siamese royal family that we were able to get the results we did. They smoothed our way everywhere, for the authority of the royal family is complete.

Indeed, Siam is one of the only three absolute monarchies left- Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Siam. Theoretically and practically, there is no limit to the power of the King of Siam in his own territories. He is the supreme law; in fact, he can make and unmake laws at will. No parliament hampers his movements, and he chooses his own advisers as he sees fit.

AN AUDIENCE WITH THE KING IS
ARRANGED

Such a ruler in this modern world is one of the most interesting and romantic of men, and we were glad to have the chance of a private interview.

Schoedsack and I were on our way out of the country. We came down out of the northern jungles thin, brown, ragged. I asked for an interview with the King, little thinking that he would be able to arrange it, for his time is filled with ofBangkok before going south. But at noon, ficial duties and we had but three days in the day before our departure, the American Minister sent word to the hotel that the King would receive us at 2 o'clock that afternoon-uniform, full evening dress.

We had no evening dress. As usual, we were traveling light, and moths had played hide and seek through the trousers of the dinner clothes I had left in Bangkok a year or more before.

There was no hope for Schoedsack; his six feet five could not be readily clothed in Bangkok; but the American colony came to my aid in a hurry, and in an hour, arrayed in the coat of the Minister, the trousers of the Manager of the International Engineers, and with the Consul’s high silk hat perched precariously on top of my head, I was speeding along in an automobile to the palace.

Solomon in all his glory felt no grander than I, thus transformed into such a thing

of misfit grandeur and beauty, after a year in camp rags.

The palace of the King lay some distance back of the throne hall (see page 266). At the gate stood a guard carrying old-fashioned halberds, and as I jumped out of the automobile two officers in spotless white uniforms greeted me in perfect English. We walked up a drive together and entered the palace.

Rich furnishings filled a large room hung with European paintings.

One of the court chamberlains entered— a lean, dignified man of forty. He, too, spoke English. Many of the Siamese nobility-in fact, most of the higher nobility are educated in England or France. "Where is Mr. Schoedsack?"

I made apologies for Schoedsack. Consternation. The reception called for two of us, and here was only one.

SIAM'S KING IS AN OXFORD MAN

A servant brought in tea and cigarettes. He dropped to his knees as he served us. The officers and the chamberlain spoke of London and Paris, but without sighs of regret, for nearly all Siamese are happy in their own country and love its ways and life-the winding, green-banked rivers, the coconut trees, the wayside temples, and the long sunshine-filled days.

Fifteen minutes. Another chamberlain entered. We walked through another suite of rooms, likewise richly furnished; then up a flight of stairs. Now the chamberlain swung open a door, drew aside, after bowing deeply to some one inside, and motioned me to enter.

In the center of a high-ceilinged, very large room stood a slight, upright figure in the uniform of an officer. There was little gold lace or other ornamentation about his dress and a single decoration was pinned on his coat.

I recognized the King. He advanced, stretched out his hand, took mine; then motioned me to a seat in a high-backed chair facing his, meanwhile saying a few conventional words of greeting.

As we sat facing each other, I looked at him curiously and carefully-this man, so great among his own people, one of the last of kings.

There was no pretense or pompousness in his manners. His eye was clear, and only occasionally did he gesticulate with

firm and even movement of the hands, as he spoke. His English was perfect; and well it might be, seeing that he had been. educated at Eton, Oxford, and Sandhurst. He is now 34 years old, and a great portion of his life has been spent in England, though he completed his military education at St. Cyr, in France, before returning to Siam.

"I know your country of America," he said. "I have traveled there. You believe in democracy, and, strange as it may sound, coming from me, I, too, believe in democracy and in representative governBut the time is not yet, in this country, for such a government. It is necessary to raise our people to a higher stage of civilization first.

ment.

"Education and schools are the way. But schools cost money, and we are a small nation and not rich. As we increase our cultivated areas, we shall have more money."

We talked along thus for a half or threequarters of an hour.

Abruptly the King rose.

"I must ask you to excuse me. I have to attend a ceremony," he said.

We shook hands and parted.

At the door of the palace, as I went out, I saw standing a Rolls-Royce ready for the King. A line of other motor cars waited behind. Five minutes after my departure the King was on his way to a temple to take his part as the head of the religion of his country, in some age-old function.

I rode home thoughtfully. I remembered the former King of Siam, this man's elder brother. When Schoedsack and I had first come there, over a year before, I had seen him play in private. theatricals, a man who devoted nearly all of his time and much of the money of the kingdom to his huge private theatrical troups, so all said in Bangkok. And now I thought of this young King, entering upon his new duties filled with the belief that a king should be "the father of his people, not their oppressor." And he was in earnest, too. No doubt of that.

So I was thinking when the Consul's silk hat nearly blew off into the street, as my car swung sharply around a turn, and I was back at the hotel ready to go south through the Malay Peninsula on our way home once again.

66

O THIS is China!"

Such was the happy conviction of Monsieur Jean Nicolet as, appropriately attired in a robe of Chinese damask, he discharged his pistols over the heads of the astonished Indians on the western shores of Lake Michigan in 1634.

It is said that the Canadian town of Lachine satirically memorializes in its French name, La Chine, the mistake of early French explorers in assuming that the "sea people" living on a "great water," of which the Algonquins had told them, were inhabitants of the Flowery Kingdom. Nevertheless, the error brings home to one the vastness of those inland waters which Nicolet took for Chinese seas.

As he and his Indian paddlers emerged from the primeval forests of New France and gained the Great Lakes, their frail canoe was on the threshold of one of Nature's most majestic creations.

Before him lay a third of the globe's fresh-water area, stretching away in five confluent bodies lying end to end. He was surrounded by water surfaces which exceed the present aggregate areas of Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and Portugal. Had he followed the five Lakes' outflung coasts along what was later to be called the American side, he would have canoed 3,774 miles, or about the ocean distance he had come from Old to New France.

Could the Indian guide of Monsieur Nicolet have foreseen modern mathematical computations, and had he remarked, "White man, if all the world's rivers flowed into these lakes' emptied basins, twelve moons would be needed to fill them," doubtless the Frenchman would have coughed politely and said, "En avant! On to China!"

THE FIRST WHITE MAN ON MICHIGAN'S TWO PENINSULAS

Furthermore, Nicolet might have noted that four of the Lakes washed the outline of two lengthy peninsulas whose tips came within six miles of touching. The first white man to tread the shores of Michigan's two peninsulas, he paused at what later Frenchmen named the Sault, or Falls, of Ste. Marie; then paddled onward for the supposed Orient.

Looking backward from to-day, when Michigan enjoys direct water communication with seven sister States and Ontario Province, with their more than 40,000,000 people - when on Michigan's northern shore the St. Marys Falls Ship Canal gives passage to the greatest lock traffic the world has ever known-one wonders if Nicolet didn't make a mistake in wanting to push on to China.

Michigan, anciently a lakeless region, owes her debt to the Glacial Period, when vast ice packs thrice advanced and thrice