548 PROCEEDINGS OE SECTION E. 
to light weights and steep climbing, is much quicker and easier in 
motion; but the ideal to ride is a four-year-old, who, to keep up with 
his longer limbed mates, has to maintain a rapid stride. At this age, 
however, he is usually frolicsome, and as yet inclined to try conclu- 
sions with the mahout, which usually ends in a good deal of shrieking 
and trumpeting as he finds himself worsted and bleeding about the 
head, while the older ones look on contemptuously with an occasional 
wink of one eye, as much as to say, “ He is young and foolish, and 
will soon learn better. 5 ’ 
The babies are just like other babies all the world round ; playing 
and rolling on the ground, getting in everybody’s way, gamboling and 
making faces, and finally sulking and shrieking for mamma, which cry, 
be sure, is never in vain, and up tears the hearty dame of seventy or 
eighty summers at all speed, regardless of all obstruction and the 
mahout’s indignation, to caress her beloved brat with her trunk; and 
the urchin is all right again in two minutes, and off to join the other 
babies, regardless of mamma’s objections. 
They say— though I will not* vouch for it — that the short, tuftless 
tails and jagged ears so often seen in otherwise good-looking elephants 
are caused by their mothers, who bite them (as we do terrier pups’ 
ears and tails) at an early age, and it is supposed to make them fierce. 
Many are captured from the wild herds, and trained, but such 
escaping again are generally reckoned to be particularly vicious. The 
“rogue” is as a rule nothing more than an ungentlemanly individual 
who has been turned out of the herd for some breach of etiquette, and 
becomes soured and ill-tempered from want of the restraining influences 
of good society, for the herd is most rigorous in its decorum and 
regular in its methods. 
It sleeps from daylight to 1 or 2 p.m., and waters and feeds at 
night ; it never crosses a stream hut at the traditional ford at which 
its grandfathers and grandmothers always crossed 150 years ago ; and 
so important a matter is this regarded that even a wounded elephant 
will not so far forget himself as to charge his assailant in the water 
unless the latter has inadvertently stationed himself at one of such 
customary fords. Ho elephants get blacker with age? The blackest 
elephants I ever travelled with were fine tuskers over eighty years 
old, and the lightest was a young spark of six, who liked a good 
dinner, and had a way of breaking into enclosures and stealing bananas, 
jackfruit, sugar-cane, &c., to the tune of a hundredweight at a time. 
His punishment was to put him to stand in the sun near a 
succulent bamboo which he was forbidden to touch. He strewed dust 
on his head and back ti keep cool, and looked infinitely bored 
standing there on three legs and coiling and uncoiling his trunk. 
The Lao of ]N r au often wear a bit of turban, like the Lus, tied 
round the central tuft of hair, while the Luang Prabang men usually 
leave the shaved head and central tuft unadorned. The women, 
unlike the Siamese, always keep their hair long, with often a flower 
cunningly displayed in the knot upon their heads. 
Chieiu/ Kan . — At Chieng Kan, however, where a fair number of 
Tongsoos from Burmah have settled, the women cut their hair short, 
and °it begins to be evident we are getting nearer the influences of 
Bangkok. Here the Nam Loey comes in from the south, from the 
township, a cluster of villages, of the same name. 
