"At 4 A.M. it was announced that we had arrived at our destination. We shook off our slumbers and looked out, and behold our junk was anchored in front of a house with open doors, literally, and windows without shutters, while a piercing, chilling wind was whistling through it. It proved to be, not in Chantaboun, but several miles below it at a Siamese dockyard. As all our boatmen had gone ashore, and we were left without a guide, we determined to 'stick to the ship' till full day, and accordingly lay down and took another nap. When we arose early in the morning we were surprised to learn that Luang Nai Sit and his retinue had lodged in that bleak house the night before, and had gone up the river to Chantaboun, and that this was the place he designed to have us occupy while we sojourned in this part of Siam. This house assigned to us here is situated over the water, exposed to the strong north winds that blow from the opposite side of the river. It is built of bamboo slats and small poles, so as to operate as a kind of sieve for the bleak winds. The most of the floor is also of bamboo slats, and admits strong currents of air through them, while the waves are both heard and seen dashing beneath them. The roof is made of attap leaves, which rattle like hail in the wind. The best rooms in the house, two in number, are enclosed with bamboo slats and lined with cajung. These were politely assigned to us by our kind friend, who is ever ready to deny himself to oblige us. This would be a delightfully cool place in the spring and summer months, but at this season of the year it is unpleasantly chilly.
"This place has no importance, only what is connected with the ship-building carried on here. There are now on the stocks not less than fifty vessels, consisting of two ships of three hundred or four hundred tons burden, thirty or forty war-boats or junks, and a number of smaller craft."
On the following day the missionaries made an excursion up the river as high as the p'rak'lang's establishment, where "we left our boat and proceeded by land two or three miles to Bang Ka Chah. The river up to the place where we left it is exceedingly serpentine, the banks being low and overflowed by the tides, and covered with an impenetrable jungle of low timber.