T^e THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



INCIDENTS OF CAMBODIAN LIFE. 



By ADHEMAKD LECLERE. 



THE Cambodian woman carries her child a-straddle of her left 

 hip, with her arm passed round its little body. She rarely 

 leaves it, except to attend to something in the house or the yard ; 

 and this custom of carrying the child thus is followed up so con- 

 stantly that one shoulder of the woman finally becomes higher 

 than the other. When the mother goes to the rice fields, or to the 

 village, or so far that this method of carrying it becomes fa- 

 tiguing, she puts the child into a shawl and carries it on her back. 

 In the house, the baby sleeps on a mat, on which the mother has 

 thrown an old sampot (cloth), so as to raise its head a little higher 

 than the body, or in a shawl hung as a hammock, or in a ham- 

 mock made of a quartered bamboo, the ends of which are whole. 

 The child is naked, but when it is cold in the morning it is given 

 a shawl or a piece of sarnpot for a covering, and is carefully cov- 

 ered at night. Boys go naked till they are six, seven, or eight 

 years old, but after that age they put on a sampot; girls are 

 dressed when they are four years old. In some parts of the coun- 

 try the children, otherwise nude, wear a small plate of orna- 

 mented silver in front. It is also a general custom to hang pieces 

 of money, ancient or modern, from the neck, and rings of silver 

 or gold on their arms and ankles. Mothers too poor to give them 

 jewels tie a piece of cord that has been blessed by a wizard around 

 their necks. The ears of girls are bored very early, sometimes 

 even before they can walk, and cotton threads are inserted, to be 

 replaced in time by gold or silver earrings. The heads of chil- 

 dren are shaved often to harden them, the Cambodians say but 

 at the age of three or four years a circular tuft is permitted to 

 grow on the top of the head, and when the hair in this spot has 

 reached a certain length it is bound and fastened with a pin of 

 gold, silver, copper, or wood. 



Cambodian children, it seems to me, are not as precocious as 

 European children, favorable as the climate is to them. Thus we 

 do not find in Cambodia (or in Annam, Tonquin, or Cochin China) 

 babies beginning to walk in their tenth or ninth month, and I 

 have never seen any who could speak correctly in their third 

 year, although in France we have little gentlemen and young 

 dames who are in their second year already very talkative and 

 very important personages. The children of the Cambodians are 

 generally pretty till they are about twelve years old, with more 

 regular features than they will have afterward ; and it is pleas- 

 ant to find in them some of the resemblance to their Indian ances- 

 tors, which has been absorbed with the features of a more numer- 



