52 THROUGH THE KLAWNGS 



So I urged the crew to effort, and Nai Kawn, who 

 was an exceptionally energetic Siamese and proved 

 a treasure in more ways than one, bombarded them 

 with native expletives and other impelling terms, 

 though without the desired result. And so we 

 gradually settled in the mud. While thus hung 

 up, an old man and woman came paddling up to us 

 in one of the little ten or twelve-foot long dug-outs, 

 heaped high amidships with cocoanuts. There 

 seemed hardly more than an inch or so of freeboard 

 anywhere between bow and stern, yet those two 

 friendly old souls, standing respectively on the bow 

 and stern of their boat, pushed and shoved, and 

 lifted and pushed again— meanwhile keeping their 

 own little craft under them without so much as 

 disturbing a single cocoanut— until they moved 

 our unwieldly launch into deeper water. All that 

 they would take in return for their aid was a little 

 tobacco. Such was my experience wherever I 

 went in Siam. I always found the pure-blooded 

 natives obliging, good-natured and the reverse of 

 avaricious. If the surrounding country was fa- 

 miliar or the thing I asked within their daily 

 knowledge, their readiness to assist was ever in 

 evidence. On the other hand, I could not hire 

 them for love or money to go inland beyond points 

 they had not traversed or which their fathers 

 before them had not penetrated. And the mixed 



