banks, and swarming alligators, and with so many interruptions that, leaving Ghazeepore on January 25th, we shall not reach Calcutta till the middle of February. The day has perhaps generally been pleasant, as we have sailed down peacefully amid picturesque and varied scenery. At times, indeed, the banks have been high, and have shut out the landscape; or featureless stretches of sandy waste have spread themselves out before us. But (meeting many tributary rivers on our way) we have passed villages, towns, cities, and ghats, with their temples, minarets, and domes; their bazaars, factories, and masses of dwellings; their multitudes. of people, Hindoos and Mussulmans; their toilers, idlers, and beggars; their numerous bathers and worshippers of Gunga; their women, oft bearing water-jar on head and child on hip, on their way to and from the river; their dead and dying on the banks; their funeral pyres, and their floating remains. We have seen their wheat, barley, and rice fields (with distant views of hilly ranges), their opium and their indigo plantations, their palm, banyan, peepul, and tamarind groves, so often inhabited by troops of monkeys and innumerable other animated creatures. We have passed battlefields, forts, old castles, and seats of learning. We have seen our Civil Stations and Military Stations, with their churches, cutcherries, bungalows, barracks, and quiet cemeteries, indicating the presence of a great ruling, administrative, and warlike, yet Christian power. Last of all, we have just passed a great Missionary Station, whence have gone forth among the people many able and zealous preachers of the Gospel, and whence have issued publications which show the learning, the devotion, and the religion of those who, giving up home and friends, have come from their native land to diffuse the knowledge of Christianity over all the region which the Ganges and its tributaries water, and all the broad domains of India.

Evening by evening we have drawn to the shore, and lugaoed. Night on the Ganges has often been very beautiful, as the moon shone on the outstretched and brilliant waters, and calm pervaded the atmosphere, or a gentle breeze lightly agitated the air. On the other hand-let us tell rather the general experience than our own-when the nights are dark and windy, and the boat rocks violently to and fro, or strikes

heavily on the sand-banks, and the overhanging cliff threatens to fall and overwhelm the vessel; when the roar of tigers, the yelling of jackals, the baying of wolves, is heard at hand, while the tick of the death-watch sounds like the leaking of the "ship," the rats play games, and scratch and squeak, the mice-unseen in the daytime-run about you, the mosquitoes blow their horns and rush to the attack, the crickets whir, the beetles hum, and the flying bugs fall in showers on the unfortunate voyageur——well, it is not so beautiful.

But now we again approach the METROPOLIS OF INDIA. The river banks become gradually more and more crowded with dwellings and buildings of all sorts,-mansions, villas, huts, pagodas, factories, foundries,-the noise of a great city begins to be heard; boats become more and more numerous (Rennell tells us that in his time thirty thousand boats were employed on the Ganges, and there are doubtless now many more); we pass among a riverside population living in and about the craft that lie on the river edge; the smell of the burning dead scents the air from the funeral pyres * (so many of which are seen between Calcutta and Benares), while vultures hover around; the ghats appropriated to the sick and dying, with their attendant priests † and relations, and the voracious

The object of cremation is to invest the departed spirit with an intermediate gross body-a peculiar frame, between the terrestrial gross body, which has just been destroyed by fire, and the new terrestrial body which it is compelled ultimately to assume till the final absorption into deity.

"The funeral ceremonies are placed under the control of the priests, and the future of the departed hangs upon the character of the payments made to him by virtue of his office.

"The funeral ceremonies of the older members of a family-for the funeral rites of children are much simpler and shorter-occupy ten days; the cost to even the poorest respectable person was forty rupees, and any one well-to-do in the world would be almost excommunicated and held in everlasting obloquy if he spent less than six or seven thousand rupees on the funeral of a father, and in carrying out all the many ceremonies consequent on his death. Instances are on record of a single funeral and 'Sraddha' costing £120,000, the greatest part being squandered on Brahmins and such-like."-Williams.

"It is to be remembered that THE DOCTRINE OF TRANSMIGRATION PREVENTS ITS VOTARIES FROM EVER EXPECTING TO SEE THEIR DEPARTED

FRIENDS IN A DIFFERENT STATE OF EXISTENCE. Before the surviving relation is called away from this troublesome earth the deceased will perhaps have passed into another form and returned into the world; the living and the dead may thus cross one another without being seen or recognised. It is consequently difficult for the Hindoo to calculate on a restoration, in any state of life, of his departed object of affection."— Bancrjce.

adjutants standing near to devour any remains, come into view; sounds of tom-toms, horns, and all kinds of native music, the trumpeting of elephants and shouting of sailors, the letting go and the lifting of anchors, are heard; a forest of masts and spars is disclosed; the masses of human beings grow denser and denser; the city opens upon us; and we step ashore in CALCUTTA. On the whole the passage has been somewhat tedious, and we are glad it is over.

Once more it is evening, and we quote again from the Native Poct, Baboo Kasiprasad Ghosh, his

FAREWELL SONG OF THE BOATMEN TO GANGA.

"Gold river! gold river! how gallantly now

Our bark on thy bright breast is lifting her prow;

In the pride of her beauty how swiftly she flies,

Like a white-winged spirit through the topaz-paved skies!

"Gold river! gold river! thy bosom is calm,

And o'er thee the breezes are shedding their balm ;
And Nature beholds her fair features portrayed
In the glass of thy bosom serenely displayed.
"Gold river! gold river! the sun to thy waves
Is fleeting to rest in thy cool coral caves;
And thence, with his star of light in the morn,
He will rise, and the skies with his glory adorn.
"Gold river! gold river! how bright is the beam

That lightens and crimsons thy soft flowing stream;
Whose waters beneath make a musical clashing,

Whose waves, as they burst, in their brightness are flashing!

"Gold river! gold river! the moon will soon grace
The hall of the stars with her light-shedding face!
The wandering planets will over thee throng,
And seraphs will waken their music and song.

"Gold river! gold river! our brief course is done,

And safe in the city our home we have won ;

And as to the bright sun now dropped from our view,
So, Ganga! we bid thee a cheerful adieu."

As we have already said, Sir W. W. Hunter has well designated and described the Hooghly-on which Calcutta stands-as "A River of Ruined Capitals." CALCUTTA alone, of all the six European Settlements which have been founded on its banks, and five of which we have passed as we descended the stream, has retained its position as a great port; for Bandel, Chinsurah, Serampore, Bankipore, and Chandernagore-the Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, German, and French ports—have all been closed, at least to ships of large burden, by the action of the river, as Calcutta assuredly would be in the course of time, if measures were not taken to prevent it.

I

CHAPTER XVIII.

LOOKING BACKWARD AND FORWARD.

WAS detained some weeks in Calcutta. Through the generous appreciation of the distinguished officers to whom I have already alluded, a second edition of "THE SOLDIER" was to be published; and my "SONGS" were also in course of publication, in a little volume which I thought it necessary to see through the press. During this time I had leisure to look around me in Calcutta. It is interesting to remember how many Members of the Indian Services have been associated with literature.

We have already referred (at Benares) to James Prinsep, the archaeologist and decipherer of inscriptions-one of a most distinguished family in the Indian service, who left Benares to take up an appointment in the Mint at Calcutta.* He died in England in 1840. Shortly after his death a meeting was held in this city, which was attended by representatives of every branch of the public service, and of all classes of the European and native communities; when it was resolved that his memory should be perpetuated by the erection of a magnificent ghaut in Calcutta, between Fort William and Baboo Ghaut, to be called after his name; that a medal bearing his effigy should be struck; and that a bust of Mr. Prinsep should be placed in the rooms of the Asiatic Society.

In like manner Sir Charles Metcalfe, whose remarkable career attracted our attention at Delhi, was honoured on leaving India—as at Agra-by a similar recognition of his

His predecessor at the Mint was the celebrated Horace Hayman Wilson, the Sanscrit scholar and Orientalist, who not only revived in the natives an interest in their own great authors, but introduced them to the knowledge of European poems and English letters, and who in 1832 returned to England to accept the Boden Professorship of Sanscrit at Oxford.

merits; and by a decision to erect a public Hall, in which the Calcutta Library should be placed; where the Agricultural Society should find a home; and which should be a perpetual monument to the many public and private virtues of that distinguished statesman. This is the building known as the Metcalfe Hall.

Macaulay, when in India in 1835, wrote: "Literature has saved my life and my reason. Even now I dare not in the intervals of business remain alone without a book in my hand. I am more than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to letters; to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs, to others."

We may travel beyond Calcutta. Many members of the Indian Covenanted Civil Service have been distinguished for their literary abilities; and many more would doubtless have been so distinguished but for the pressure of their official duties,* and the enervating influence of the climate.† We may mention the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone (a reader from his youth), whose "Cabul and its Dependencies" places its author in the first rank of historians and travellers in the East; and whose "History of India" is pronounced to be "a work of the greatest authority and learning."

We have already spoken of the literary productions of some of our Military Officers-Colonels Sleeman and C. J. Davidson, Major Calder Campbell, and Captain Richardson. The works of Colonel Sleeman are of special interest, in con

* Sir C. Elliott, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, well describes this in a recent speech (1890-91):-"There is no leisured class amongst us who have time to look around, collect and digest information, and give it out to us in a literary form. We are all slaves of the desk. . . . We most of us work more incessantly than almost any class in any other country. No class has the time to know much of what another class does. Civilians and military men live side by side in our large stations, and yet how few men of either service know much of what occupies intensely the minds of the other class-on the one hand, the soldier's aspirations after military improvement and efficiency; on the other, the civilian's efforts for the better administration of the country! Similarly, neither the civilian, nor the military man, nor the engineer, nor the merchant, know much of the career of the remainder."

† Among the retired members of the Covenanted Civil Service who have distinguished themselves in literature since their retirement, we may name Dr. R. N. Cust, eminent for his philological and other works, and his missionary labours.