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MY DIARY IN INDIA.

CHAPTER I.

Departure for the East.-Scant time for preparation.- My fellow passengers. —Marine cookery.-Daily life in an oriental

steamer.

Nor one year home from the Crimea and I am once more on my way to the East-another and a farther East. Landing with the first British soldiers who set foot on the soil of Turkey I had accompanied the advanced guards of the British army to Gallipoli, to Scutari, to Varna, and to Old Fort, and, in 1856, had quitted the camp before Sebastopol only when I was left alone in the front with the rats and the Cossacks. Then, after a visit of just ten days to England, I went once more to Russia, witnessed the coronation of the Emperor at Moscow, the "barbaric pearl and gold" of the most magnificent spectacle these later ages of ours have ever produced, travelled south to the Crimea, revisited the resting-places of our illustrious dead, and, turning westwards to Odessa, traversed the steppes by Bender, and passing through the muchdisputed Bolgrad, in the beginning of winter reached Czernovitch, from which my way homewards lay straight before me, and I arrived in London once more in the spring of 1857. The close of the same year

VOL. I.

B

sees me bound to the regions of which the "we" of England know so little, and as to which our carelessness has been an equivalent of our ignorance. But our apathy has been rudely disturbed. It was just as our journalists and statesmen were somewhat feebly glorifying our rule in India, and mildly rebuking the neglect which was allowing the centenary of Plassey and the grandeur of Clive to pass away, that the day of whose advent Metcalfe had prophesied and Napier had warned dawned in Hindostan and cast its blood-red light over the land. Hideous massacres of men, women, and children,-compared with which Sylla's proscriptions, the Sicilian vespers, the great auto da fè on Bartholomew's eve, or the Ulster outbreak of 1641, were legitimate acts of judicial punishment, were reported to us with such seasoning of horrors, made by skilful masters in that sort of cookery, as the imagination had never before devised. I had been deeply impressed by those awful scenes. I was moved to the inner soul by the narratives which came to us by every mail, and I felt that our struggle against those monsters of cruelty and lust must be crowned by Heaven with success. But after a time I began, mail after mail, to seek for evidence of the truth of those disgusting anecdotes glossed with still more revolting insinuations. I never doubted them, but I wanted proof, and none was forthcoming. All the stories we heard emanated from Calcutta, and the people of Calcutta were far from the districts where, no doubt, most treacherous and wholesale murder had been perpetrated. At last I was going out to the very country which had acquired such a fearful interest in our eyes, and I hoped to join my

SCANT TIME FOR PREPARATION.

3

countrymen ere their vengeance was consummated, and India was once more restored, at least, to the tranquillity of conquest.

I had but scant time for preparation, and even that was encroached upon by domestic affairs; but thanks to the resources of those who in London are called upon every hour to provide outfits for every portion of the globe-from the North Pole to Australia-I was in readiness to start within a week, crossed to Calais in a winter gale, managed to arrive in Paris just as the train for Marseilles-the last that could catch the steamer for Alexandria-left it, journeyed express with the officer in charge of the mails, who fortunately was as late as myself, by special engine and carriage till we overtook the mail-train beyond Lyons, and had just a moment at Marseilles to get my permit and embark on board the Valetta, which was soon, with the lively habits of her class, battling the mistral in the Gulf of Lyons, and plunging through head seas like a cormorant in a tide-way. The number of books on the overland route from time to time which have been "done" by various hands would constitute a library per se, but all its incidents have been exhausted by him who made that famous trip from Cornhill to Cairo; and, as I have read from an early age in reviews and magazines perpetual remonstrances against the vanity of those who think their eyes are better and their wit brighter than those of others, and who have, therefore, insisted on giving the public their version of the impressions produced by this beaten ground and much-vexed sea, I shall not say one word about the Mediterranean, and but little of the waters which form by far the greater part of what is, by a sort of

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