in Calcutta, Serampore, and Lower Bengal affairs-a man of great sagacity, the friend of the most remarkable Governor-General since the days of Wellesley, and one who formed his judgments with care, and expressed them with deliberation. He, then and there, speaking of Indian subjects-in which I was little interested, but into which we were drawn by talking of the Persian difficulty-declared his conviction that India was as well-disposed and as safe as any part of the Queen's dominions-safer than Ireland, certainly; and that there was one soldier in India who, in the event of any occurrence giving him the opportunity of showing what he was made of, would astonish us all in Europe-Colonel Havelock. The success of one prediction may be balanced against the failure of the other. The ladies who had survived the miseries and the fire of Lucknow, are now on their way to Calcutta, or have reached it. Aden, I asked one of the Peninsular and Oriental Company's officers how many mutilated ladies he had seen. "Seen!" he said, "why no one has seen any of them here. They all go round the Cape, I suppose." But I still believed.

At

CHAPTER VII.

The Hooghly.-Hindoo Temples.-Garden Reach.-Floating Hindoo corpses.-The Bengal Club.-The city of palaces. -The fort.-Simon, once Allagapah.-The Esplanade.-A drive in the dark.-Europeans and Indians.-The Auckland hotel.-Proposed objects for investigation.-Musquitoes and jackals.

January 28th.- Last evening's sun set over a wide waste of yellow waters, the bounds of which, low and desolate-looking, could just be made out on both sides of the ship. As the river contracts, the commercial greatness of the mighty stream and the port it feeds developes itself in hundreds of ships of the first class, magnificent clippers, weight-carrying Indiamen of the old school, fleets of country boats which, working up and down through the many tortuous channels, gave an appearance of life and activity to the scene which could not be surpassed by the Downs. The native shipping, in rigging, masts, sails, and hull, are odd-looking and dilapidated, and the only craft which they at all resemble, as far as I can remember, are the boats of the Turkish Black Sea ports with the high sterns. The crews of those we approach are thin slight men, nearly black, and very poorly attired. On our starboard quarter, towards evening, we have Saugor Island, much haunted of tigers, who feast on the deer abounding in the jungle, and keep the lighthouse people in a state of constant alarm; for there is a lighthouse on the island, the attendants on which

are sustained by various artificial devices to supply the absence of water, and to compensate for the presence of wild beasts. Non meus sermo, sed quæ præcepit O'Fellius-abnormis sapiens. A grand idea of the Midasian magnitude of our Indian appointments was given to me this morning early, when, in order to account for all the buttons, and bands, and aureate trappings of the pilot, O'Fellius further informed me that the pilots retire on pensions of 7007. sterling per annum. Why don't Lincoln's, Gray's, and all the Temples emigrate, and force their way into the Indian pilot service? The only drawback O'Fellius could suggest was, that few of them lived to enjoy these pensions. They put in many hard nights, and the climate is unfavourable, and their duties are arduous; "therefore," quoth O'F., "in order to induce some of them to live, the high pension is put forth."

This morning the noble river-for all rivers are noble which are big, dirty, and have plenty of ships, though this stream is as full of danger as the Mississippi is of snags has narrowed considerably. We lay-to during the night to suit some phase of tide or bank, and now we are screwing up against the very muddy boiling current, increased in force by an ebb tide. Here we are amid "The Silas E. Burrowes, of Boston, U.S.," "The Marquis of Tweeddale, of Glasgow," "Rustamjee Puckerjie, of Calcutta," "Les Trois Frères, Bordeaux," and several native vessels of large tonnage, which are trying, by the aid of a light wind, to beat up against the tideway, and the hands at our wheel must be strong and quick. And there, in effect, with real straw hats, under which are curled long tails which would enrapture Marsh or Truefitt, in neat clean

HINDOO TEMPLES.

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toggery, bull-necked, square-shouldered, and stronglegged, stand the four Chinese helmsmen, conned by the English quartermasters, upping with the helm and downing with it, and-letting her go about or round, or keeping her just within a few yards of the Parsee's quarter-we scrape through and screw on, and by-andby, the banks on each side strike out bodily to meet us, and the faint verge of green, which refreshed the eye last night, turns into a belt of cocoa-nuts worthy of Ceylon. Villages there are also of muddy creeks, which put one in mind of tide-deserted eyots at Chiswick suddenly tenanted by quaint boats, and people who had just bathed in the Thames and had not scraped the black mud off them. There is one building, certainly, near to most of those villages, we should not see near the Thames. Heavy-domed, squat, and, to my mind, ungraceful, the Hindoo temple, surrounded by a clump of trees, raises its white cupola amid their tops, but has no beauty of elevation, and is utterly deficient in the simply beauty of the Mussulman mosque. They, however, presented the usual contrast observable in poor and ignorant countries, in the fineness of the temples to the poverty of the people. The great manufacturing town of Peddlington is content with a red brick temple, surmounted by a weathercock, which altogether looks like the workhouse built "tempore Eliz., anno reg. 10." In Ireland we have cut stone or elaborately-cemented cathedrals and parish churches. In Bengal, the heathen, who live in mud huts propped up by bamboo canes, worship in temples of marble or in finely-worked chunamfaced pagodas. Men and women were working in the fields naked to the waist, and reflecting the rays o

the sun from their dark glistening bodies. The high banks of the river, which seem of artificial make, permit only the farther portions of the wide-spread plains, which melt into dense groves in the distance, to be seen. There are apparently no roads, and no traffic between the villages, but innumerable watercourses and cuts winding between muddy banks, and, no doubt, with internal communications. The Sonderbunds, which we passed on our right, the widespreading islands and deltas of the rivers which here join the sea, afford the greatest possible facility for canalization, but up to the present moment, in spring, when the rivers are low, a steamer coming down from Patna or Allahabad is obliged to double the length of her voyage at least, owing to the want of a channel of sufficient depth, amid islands and streams which want but little comparatively to be done to render them available as the banks and watercourses of a permanent and unvarying navigation. All this is "interloper" and anti-company assertion, and even hypothesis. The river itself is not interesting; the tropical vegetation and hues which give such a charm and novelty to Ceylon have disappeared, and the cocoanut trees which fringe the banks are wearisome to the eye, owing to their uniformity of size, foliage, and colour. The muddy river, churned into yellowish, buttery foam where it chafes against the sandbanks, is of the colour and breadth of the Mersey at New Brighton. There is immense noise on board, and great anxiety, for the luggage and baggage is coming out of the hold, swayed up by reckless arms on the running tackle, and the fine overland trunks, hat-boxes, guncases, and ladies' boxes arrive on deck in various