The din was successful, too, for just before the moon disappeared, the frightened toad had begun to spit it out again, which meant good luck all around.

How quaint it all seemed the next day. A restaurant posted a reminder to patrons ``who became excited and left without paying their checks.'' But everyone I met had sought cover first and asked questions later. And no wonder, for Vientiane, the old City of Sandalwood, had become the City of Bullet Holes.

I saw holes in planes at the airport and in cars in the streets. Along the main thoroughfares hardly a house had not been peppered. In place of the police headquarters was a new square filled with rubble. Mortars had demolished the defense ministry and set fire to the American Embassy next door. What had been the ambassador's suite was now jagged walls of blackened brick.

This damage had been done in the battle of Vientiane, fought less than three months earlier when four successive governments had ruled here in three days (December 9 -- 11, 1960). And now, in March, all Laos suffered a state of siege. The Pathet Lao forces held two northern provinces and openly took the offensive in three more. Throughout the land their hit-and-run terrorists spread fear of ambush and death.

``And it's all the more tragic because it's so little deserved,'' said Mr. J. J. A. Frans, a Belgian official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. We talked after I hailed his Jeep marked with the U. N. flag.