SIAM
Dear sirs! Most maidenly mademoiselles! Such foul and TERRIFIC circumstances find me back at my Little Home, and not dangling over a certain pit of DOOM this lovely August noon!
Where to begin? Where indeed…
Mere moments after setting out down the road to the market on that late June eve I last wrote, I was the victim of a kidnapping most uncouth. Struck from behind as I passed the bramble and branch just outside the stone columns of my drive, I sunk into a deep sleep from which I did not awake for nearly two full days. When I did awake, my body was shoved most ungraciously into a ripe steamer trunk, trundled off into the storage of some blasted boat bound for Siam!
J. Chubb
However! My attackers failed to take into account my most masterful tutelage under famed lock-maker, Jeremiah Chubb. I deftly escaped my confines and spent the rest of the voyage handily thwarting the young deckhands at all manner of game and song. Ribald though they may be, the young scallions learned quite a bit in the way of manners and chess playing on our two week voyage to the old East.
Captain Belliewigs
The captain, a right salty curr by the name of Thomisina Belliewigs, informed me that a gentleman ”dressed in nothin’ but black, and smellin’ of AWFUL death,” paid him 450 quid to see me delivered to a man by the name of “Uncle Roger,” once we docked in old Bangkok town. Quite plainly, he spoke, and quite plainly he traded me my freedom for my dear mother’s golden fobwatch (and a fifth of gutterwine I happened to have in a flask, secured to my thigh).
We landed in old Bangkok-town the second week of July, and OH MY the adventures that unfolded. But the night grows long, and I fear that my rheumy eye is acting up… adieu, adieu until the day provides better light by which to describe the utter madness yet to unfold in the telling.
