a mast, and one, or sometimes two sails, of a square form (or rather broader above than below), of very coarse and flimsy canvas. Nothing can seem more clumsy or dangerous than these boats. Dangerous I believe they are, but with a fair wind they sail over the water merrily. The breeze this morning carried us along at a good rate, yet our English-rigged brig could do no more than keep up with the cooking

boat.

There is a large ruined building a few miles to the south of Chandernagore, which was the country house of the Governor during the golden days of that settlement, and of the French influence in this part of India. It was suffered to fall to decay when Chandernagore was seized by us; but when Mr. Corrie came to India, was, though abandoned, still entire, and very magnificent, with a noble staircase, painted ceilings, &c.; and altogether, in his opinion, the finest building of the kind in this country. It has at present a very melancholy aspect, and in some degree reminded me of Moreton-Corbet, having, like that, the remains of Grecian pillars and ornaments, with a high carved pediment. In beauty of decoration, however, it falls far short of Moreton-Corbet, in its present condition. This is the only visible sign of declining prosperity in this part of the country. The town of Chandernagore itself, though small, is neat, and even handsome. It has a little Catholic church, and some very tolerable streets, with respectable dwelling-houses. An appearance of neatness and comfort is exhibited by the native villages; and, as an Indian generally lays out some of his superfluous wealth in building or adding to a pagoda, it is a strong mark of progressive and rapid improvement to say, as Mr. Corrie did to-day, that all the large pagodas between "Calcutta and this place have been founded, or re-built, in his memory." This, however, I must confess, does not tell much for the inclination of the Hindoos to receive a new religion. Indeed, except in our schools, I see no appear

A ruinous building in Shropshire.-ED.

ance of it. The austerities and idolatries exercised by them strike me as much, or I think more, the more I see of them. A few days since I saw a tall, large, elderly man, nearly naked, walking with three or four others, whc suddenly knelt down one after the other, and catching hold of his foot, kissed it repeatedly. The man stood with much gravity to allow them to do So, but said nothing. He had the string ("peeta ") of a Brahmin. Another man passed us, on Sunday morning last, hopping on one foot. He was a devotee who had made a vow never to use the other, which was now contracted, and shrunk close up to his hams. Lately, too, I saw a man who held his hands always above his head, and had thus lost the power of bringing them down to his sides. In general, however, I must own that these spectacles are not so common, at least so far as I can yet judge, as, before I came to India, I expected to find them.

Chandernagore was taken by Lord Clive and Admiral Watson, in 1757, after a gallant and bloody defence: and it is worth recording, as a proof of the alterations which have taken place in this branch of the Ganges, that Watson brought up a seventy-four gun ship to batter it. It was afterwards restored to the French, who lost it again during the war of the Revolution, but who have now received some favours from the English Government, at which, when compared with the severity shown towards the colonists of Serampoor, the latter think they have reason to repine.

We spent a very pleasant evening with Mons. Pellissier. Our party consisted of his wife, daughter, and son, the physician and secretary of the factory, and an Abbé, whom I supposed to be the chaplain. The little church, which I had seen from the beach, belongs to the "Tibet Mission," a branch of the society" pro propaganda fide" at Rome, which seems to extend its cares all over India, which it supplies for the most part with Italian priests, though my old visitor, the Rev. Jacob Mecazenas, the Georgian monk, is one of its agents. They have a bishop

somewhere near Agra, an Italian, and the priests (for I understood there were more than one at Chandernagore) are of this nation also. We returned to our pinnace soon after ten.

June 17.- About two o'clock this morning we had a north-wester, accompanied with violent thunder and lightning. It lasted about two hours, and was so severe that we could not but feel thankful that it had not overtaken us the night before, while we were under sail. I have never heard louder thunder, or seen so vivid and formidable lightning. Happily our attendant boats were close in shore, under the shelter of the high bank, while our own mariners did their work exceedingly well and quietly, letting go a second anchor, and veering out as much cable as they had on board. After having done all that under such circumstances was to be done, they gave the cry of Allah hu Allah!" and went to prayers, a circumstance which, unaccompanied as it was by any marks of confusion or trepidation, gave me a very favourable impression of them, though I afterwards recollected that it was in fact pretty near the hour when that call is uttered from the mosque, which used to thrill me when I heard it in the Crimea, "Prayer is better than sleep! prayer is better than sleep!" Our boat, with this length of cable, rode well and easily, but we had some troublesome work in closing the cabin windows, as our rooms, and all they contained, were getting a complete cold bath. Indeed there really ran something like a sea in the channel of the river where we now lay. What passed gave me confidence in the vessel and her crew. The latter are numerous, sixteen rowers, four men accustomed to the management of the sails, and the serang, all Mussulmans, and natives of Dacca and its vicinity. They are wild and odd-looking people, light-limbed, and lean, and very black, but strong and muscular, and all young men, with a fiercer eye and far less civil manner than the Hindoos of Calcutta, to which expression of character their dress contributes (when they wear any, which is the case this cool morning), being old

uniform jackets of the infantry and artillery, with red caps and dirty turbans wrapped round them. As they sat round the fire this morning, cooking their victuals for breakfast, they might pass for no bad representatives of Malay pirates. The wind, though much abated, continued till after five to blow so hard that the boatmen declined heaving anchor; but having then shifted to the south again we set off, and sailed with great rapidity by Chinsura and Hooghly, which form almost one town, with some large and handsome, though desertedlooking, houses. At Chinsura is a church, and beyond Hooghly, at a place I believe named Banda, is a large Italian-looking church, with what appears to be a convent. The river here contracts very much, the banks are higher and more precipitous, and the view of the channel, with our little fleet in it, extremely picturesque and pretty. I hailed Mr. Corrie, and was glad to hear they had sustained no damage in the storm. The river now again expanded into a broad sheet of water, with rice-grounds on each side, and the villages further removed from each other, but each marked out by its wood of tall fruit-trees. The country, except that the river is so much wider, is not at all unlike some parts of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire on the Thames. There are fewer pagodas to be seen, and none so handsome as those we have passed. There is, however, a rather more abundant sprinkling of Europeanlike houses and bungalows, the`residences of the indigo planters, as our boatmen tell us. And one of the villages, which has two or three brick houses, and a small low tower attached to one of them, was interesting to us, from the sort of resemblance it offered to some in our own dear England. A little above this village we passed "a sign of a civilised country," being a gibbet, with two men in chains on it, who were, as our serang told us, executed two years ago for robbery and murder in this neighbourhood, but not on the river. The district bears a bad name for all sorts of robbery. A mile or two higher up is a large island, which seems to have been recently de

serted by the stream, and not yet taken possession of by man, being mostly bare sand, and bordered by long grass and reeds (not bamboos), a very likely place for wild beasts to harbour. It was, indeed, in this neighbourhood that Mrs. Corrie saw the fresh print of a tyger's feet, exactly like those of a cat, but each as large as a good-sized plate. Here again the banks of the river are precipitous, and Southey might have taken the spot as the scene of his Kailyal, and the image of her guardian goddess falling down the crumbling steep into the river. A few miles further brought us to a broad channel, which diverged to our right hand from the main bed of the river, being in fact a stream flowing into the Hooghly, and itself derived from the Matabunga, a branch of the great Ganges, which flows from the neighbourhood of Jellinghey to the centre of the Sunderbunds. This, when there is water enough to float large vessels, is the most direct communication between Calcutta and Dacca, and we had some reason to hope we might find it navigable at present. We anchored, therefore, at the mouth, and sent the jolly-boat with the serang and Abdullah*, to make inquiry at Seebpoor, a place where toll is paid, a little within the entrance. I sent Abdullah, who speaks English, in the belief that an European was stationed there, from whom he was more likely than a dandee to obtain information. In the meantime, and after they had been gone a quarter of an hour, the wind changed two points more westerly, and began to blow harder, so that I perceived we should have some difficulty to avoid going ashore, from which we were scarcely half a cable's length distant. I, therefore, proposed to the boatmen to weigh anchor, and proceed a little farther while yet we had the power. They readily assented, and were going to do so, when the return

* This man was a Mussulman convert of

Mr. Corrie's, who had travelled in Persia with Sir Gore Ouseley, and accompanied him to England, from whence he was returning in the Grenville, in a state of great poverty, when the Bishop took him into his service as "jemautdar," or head officer of the peons.—

ED.

VOL. I.

of the serang put a stop to our proceedings. He, indeed, immediately called to them, on reaching the vessel, to go on with what they had begun, at the same time sending some men with long bamboos to the stern to stave the vessel off the shore. This was very necessary, since ashore she went in a few minutes, and the wind freshening, and there being little or no tide to help us here, I concluded that we were to continue fixed till the rising of the river from the rains set us free. To my surprise, however, the matter was settled in a few minutes; all the crew but the serang, who remained to steer, jumped into the water about as high as their waists. Half the party by main strength and weight of pressure thrust off the boat from the bank, while, as soon as she floated, the rest began to tow a-head. They thus carried her merrily along the lee shore for about two hundred yards, when, the headland being passed, we had again sea-room, and they all swam on board like so many waterrats. This, of course, shows the extreme lightness of our vessel, and how little water boats of her class require. In the meantime I was hearing the report of Abdullah and the serang, who, as it appeared now, had discovered no

66

chokey" or toll-house, nor anything of the kind. They found, however, two large native boats which had just come down the river, whose crew assured them there was plenty of water for a vessel of greater burthen than ours, while their account was in other respects so favourable as to distance and time saved, that I made up my mind at once to go this way. Accordingly, as Mr. Corrie's budgerow was in sight, I got into the jolly-boat and went aboard to tell him my change of plan. We parted with mutual kind wishes, and in the hope of meeting again at Boglipoor the 20th of July.

Besides the saving of time which my journey to Dacca by this course will occasion, I am not sorry to go through a part of the country which I am told not many Europeans traverse, and where there are no stations or other usual places of intercourse between them and the natives. We set sail about half

past one, and continued our course along the new channel till evening. We found it about as wide as the Dee a little below Chester, flowing with a gentle and equable stream from the north-east by north, through fields cultivated to a considerable extent with indigo. Several porpoises were playing round the vessel, and a good many fishermen came up to offer their wares for sale. We continued our course through a country more bare of trees and more abundant in pasture than those parts of Bengal which I had yet seen, till half-past five in the evening, when the men, heartily tired, begged leave to halt for the night at a place named Ranaghât. This is a large village, with two very noble villas, like those of the rich Baboos in Calcutta, the property of a wealthy Hindoo family of the name of Kishnapantee. A little before we reached these we had passed a ruined palace of an old Raja of Bengal (the boatmen knew no more of him), and its name Urdun Kali. We took a short walk after dinner, but found it too hot to go far. The scenery is still like that near the Thames, and the likeness is increased by the circumstance that there are no coco-trees. The high crumbling bank of the river is full of small holes, containing the nests of the muenas, and I saw a field of what I took for millet, which I did not know was a product of India. Our boatmen, who had been in and out of the water like any amphibious creatures, sometimes rowing, sometimes pushing, sometimes dragging our bark along the narrow and winding channel, displaying great spirit, cheerfulness, and activity, were seated on the bank dressing for supper the fish which they had bought from the boats I mentioned; while apart, at cautious distance, and within their magic circle of chalk, our Hindoo servants were preparing a more frugal repast of rice, currie, and pine-apples, which cost exactly a pice a piece. Of the small fish a pice will buy two large handsful, as much as a man can well keep in his grasp. The fires of these different messes were very picturesque, and the more so, as a little further down, the

crews of the cooking and baggage boats had each their little bivouac. I was glad these poor people got their supper over before the usual north-wester and its fall of rain came to drive them under cover. The wind, however, was a mere nothing, and even if it had been a storm, it could not have touched us in our present situation.

June 18.-Our course from Ranaghât was up a wider and deeper stream, and chiefly to the N.W.-a circumstance irreconcileable with Rennell's map, unless the discrepancy can be accounted for by an extraordinary alteration of the river's channel. The banks here are higher and more precipitous, the country woody, and sometimes really very interesting, while coco-trees, of which we supposed we had taken leave, re-appeared, and continued to tower, from time to time, over the bamboos, banyans, and fruit-trees.

About half-past five we brought-to for the night, at a place which our crew called Sibnibashi, but so differently situated (being further to the south, and on a different side of the river) from the Sibnibas of Rennell, that I at first thought they must be mistaken. We landed, with the intention of walking to some pagodas, whose high angular domes were seen above the trees of a thick wood, at some small distance; which wood, however, as we approached it, we found to be full of ruins, apparently of an interesting description. Near our landing-place a row of large Kedgeree pots, with their mouths carefully covered with leather, as if just landed from a boat, attracted our attention. Abdullah said that they probably contained Ganges water from Benares or Hurdwar, which the Hindoos of high rank used for washing their idols; and that, in this case, they might be destined for the same employment in the pagoda before us. As we advanced along the shore, the appearance of the ruins in the jungle became more unequivocal; and two very fine intelligent-looking boys whom we met, told me, in answer to my inquiries, that the place was really Sibnibashi,-that it was very large and very old, and that there were good