Chapter VII: Calcutta

In a heavy storm of rain, thunder and lightning early one Sunday morning the British India Company's steamship _Bengala_, on which I had travelled from Rangoon, began making her way up the Hooghly. Grey mud-banks appeared vaguely in the stinging drift. There were toddy-palms here and there and villages of thatched huts with plantains about them, the broad green leaves standing out against the darker background. Leaves, blown on the wind, whirled aimlessly across the dirty sea.

The few passengers on the _Bengala_ were all eager to see "James and Mary"; and beyond another village on a spit of sand with a crowd of small fishing-boats at anchor, we passed the now celebrated spot where a couple of masts still protruded above the water. All hands had been called to be ready before we reached this fatal place, but no siren voices sounded from the tragic sands.

At Budge Bridge, about 14 miles from Calcutta, where there are large oil storage {106} tanks, we began to pass jute-mills on the opposite bank and many brick-making places. At Garden Reach we dropped the pilot and picked up the Harbour Master just as a Natal coolie emigrant ship, the _Umfuli_, passed us on her way out.

Then--a crowd of shipping--the usual slow scramble of disembarking--and I stood in the capital city of all India.

In a large park called the Maidan, a tall white-fluted column rises from an Egyptian base. This is the Auchterlony Monument, and from the top of it a splendid view is obtained of the general plan of the town. At one end of the Maidan you can see Government House, and at the other the race-course and polo-ground beyond the skating rink, boxing-booths and circus tents. Fort William lies on the riverside and opposite to it, looking on to the Maidan as Piccadilly does on to the Green Park, lies Chowringhee, with the Grand Hotel, clubs, stores, museums and English residences.

And beyond Chowringhee, north of all this, is an immense city of native streets, bazaars, squares, temples and theatres; while at Howrah, on the south side of the river, extends a long series of mighty factories, jute-mills and engineering works. It is on this side that is situated the great Howrah Railway Station, the terminus of the Eastern Bengal State Railway, and there {107} is as yet only one bridge to carry the heavy traffic across the river. This is in appearance a kind of glorified pontoon, but its series of projecting barge ends recalls a little the long line of buttresses on old London Bridge, seen in Van Wyngaerde's drawing. At every hour of the day this great artery of pulsing life is a close-packed moving mass of men and traffic (at night for a couple of hours it is sometimes closed to vehicles).

The English stranger, anxious for his mail, will probably soon find his way to the white marble steps of the General Post Office. At the top of the steps seven tall columns support the great dome, and the round-arched entries between them are closed as to the upper part by wooden screens with cross shutter-bars. At first as you walk into the shadow out of the blazing sunlight all seems dark as Erebus, and then gradually you make out between columns the various bureaux with their little brown-framed peep-holes like railway station booking-offices.

Inside the poste restante division a native gentleman, in gold-rimmed spectacles and a shawl of a reddish-yellow plaid over his shoulders, is looking through the letters of a mail just arrived, and some empty chairs at a neighbouring writing-table covered with blue cloth offer comfort for immediate perusal. In the roof {108} yellow light comes faintly through the covered windows which circle it just below the dome--that vast white dome which dominates the city more than do the towers of the High Court, even as news is more clamorous than justice.

Chuprassees and servants come and go and presently you thread your way among them and emerge again, as I did, into the glare of daylight in Dalhousie Square, where the Bengal Government Offices are reflected in the blue water of a large "tank."

I crossed Koda Ghat Street, among bullock-carts and gharries, and turned to look back at the Post Office clock with its black hands pointing to black figures. At the gate into the square a policeman was buying betel, and close by, with sage-green railings round it, I saw the white marble statue of Dharbanga sitting cross-legged, with sword in one hand held across his knees and the other resting on a small shield target,--a fine piece by Onslow Ford. This is a stopping-place for electric trams, and great blocks of office buildings face the road on this side of the square, such as those of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the Standard Life Assurance Company, and, in slate-coloured plaster and red brick, the Central Telegraph Office. Opposite to them on the edge of the square the Doric columns of the Dalhousie Institute shield a statue of the Marquis of Hastings.

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A young man was carrying an old one upon his shoulders, as Aeneas carried his father Anchises: beggars importuned: and as I turned up Old Courthouse Street a child, weighed down by a heavy baby, touched my arm appealingly. I hurried on past great shops, Cook's Offices and a jeweller's shining in white and gold, big chemists and diamond merchants. Four nearly naked coolies carrying a black palanquin knocked against me at the end of Government Place.

Crossing the West Entrance to Government House you notice how the lawns in front are covered with great marquee offices on either side of the dragon-borne gun on the red ground-space in front of the main building. I was now on the Maidan, and walking past a group of Chinamen across the grass to cut off the corner, soon reached Chowringhee and my rooms in the Grand Hotel, that huge straggling caravanserai, otherwise known as "Mrs Monks!" They were in a part of the building dubbed by Calcutta youth "The Monastery," from its proximity to the stage-door of a Vaudeville Opera House. The windows of the auditorium, always open, were only separated by a few yards from my rooms.

_A Door must be Open or Shut_ is the title of one of De Musset's plays, but I had already learned that in India a door locked is by no means shut. It is often a mere skeleton of wood {110} provided with cross slats; and although an inner curtain ensures privacy, no external sound escapes the inmate. During my stay in Calcutta, until after each midnight, _The Merry Widow_, alternated with other musical comedies and like Coleridge's _Wedding Guest_--"I could not choose but hear."

The other inmates of the hotel consisted partly of tourists, partly of residents, partly of men "on short leave" with nothing to do, and partly of officials whose patronage they desired. My immediate neighbour, who borrowed a new shirt from me, which he did not return, was by no means a typical member of the service. He would have afforded copy to an anti-English agitator, but to me appeared merely an instance of a man whose character was unsuited to the mixture of freedom and isolation which life in India involves.

A very different type of man was D. who had just come up from the Malabar Coast. In that part of the country long settled, or rather long unsettled, there are a number of people of Arab descent. A riotous and lawless crew, they gave such constant trouble that a law was finally passed called the Mopla Law, under which any Mopla, as these people are called, could be instantly deported "on suspicion of being a suspect." Still they were rampageous, and not infrequently a party of pillaging {111} scoundrels would only be overcome by military aid.

Now, shortly after my acquaintance was moved to that part of the Madras Presidency a party of Moplas, after generally running riot, entrenched themselves in a strong position on a rocky hilltop. D. was called over to the place in a hurry, and a captain in command of some British troops at hand was eager for action. "Just give me the word," said he, "and we'll soon have them out of that." He could not, of course, move without the civil authority giving permission.

"No," D. replied; "if I gave you the word, you would shoot or take these Moplas, but in doing it you would certainly lose some of your own men. Every soldier killed means incalculable harm, and I don't intend one single life to be lost over this affair." He insisted on their merely sitting round the hill to prevent escape, and in a few days' time down came the Moplas to treat. D. talked to them, deported nobody, and for many many years there has, he told me, not been one serious case of Mopla trouble on the Malabar Coast. Well, there's nothing in that story warranting any general statement. It only shows one of the countless situations with which the Indian civil servant has to deal. The English officer was ready to risk his own and his men's lives in a moment, as he should {112} be, and the English magistrate knew when to hold him back. Both were needed and both were there.

On my first evening in Calcutta, wishing to see the largest number of Europeans together that I could, I went to the evening service at St Paul's Cathedral. The church consists of an unusually wide nave, with a green barrelled roof studded with Tudor roses--side aisles and a tall spire at the western end. The rain had stopped and the roads were drying a little, but it was cold and raw, and many ladies were actually wearing furs! Choir-boys in violet gowns and white surplices began to congregate near the large organ at the north-east corner. Gradually the church filled. There was just a small sprinkling of Eurasians and here and there a native face, but the congregation was almost entirely European.

Hanging from the ceiling were candelabras of electric lights, but a brighter galaxy of ecclesiastical stars was shortly to appear. A Synod had been held during the previous week, and ten out of its eleven bishops took part in this service. The procession, with so many pastoral staffs, was quite an imposing one, and it was most interesting to compare the genuflexions of these people, the rich vestments, gilded staffs and various emblems of worship and authority with those of the native religions. {113} The sermon, which was preached by the then Bishop of Calcutta, dealt largely with the allegory of the Church as the Bride of Christ, and the duties of bishops in her preparation for Marriage. It was rambling and tedious, but the choir sang well and the playing of the fine organ was admirable.

The 12th of January was the ninth day of the ten days' Hindoo festival of the Sankarati Puja. I went over to the Howrah Bridge to see the bathing. On the stone building on the right, as I looked over the bridge railing at the top of the great flight of steps, a slab is let into the wall inscribed in English:--

"This stone is dedicated by a few Englishwomen to the memory of those pilgrims, mostly women, who perished with the 'Sir John Lawrence' in the cyclone of the 25th May, 1887."

A golden-brown butterfly was settled near the stone on the grey stucco wall. The river, dirty everywhere, was here thickly strewn with floating rubbish. The whole of the steps and the edge of the river were crowded with bathers and people ministering to them--some grave and deliberate, others lively and splashing, washing their bright-coloured draperies and clothes and rubbing their own brown bodies with the sacred water.

They were Mahrattas, these people, and about {114} the steps squatted men ready to paint the caste mark afresh upon their foreheads for a few pice. They trimmed and twisted and smoothed their hair, gazing in little looking-glasses for the final touches, and passing through the stone shelter building above the steps, put pice into a brass tray in the street, where a trunk of sandalwood was set up in plaster and four lingams, two white and two black, were heaped with marigolds and other flower garlands in an altar shaped like a well-head.

All this was, of course, going on cheek by jowl with the traffic of the town. The stream of laden bullock-carts, gharries and palkis flowed over the bridge as swiftly as the water beneath it. On the opposite, the Howrah side, are many works and factories, including the chief jute-mills. From there to Ulabaria, far down the river, there are on the Hooghly banks seventy-eight jute- and cotton-mills and presses. They have doubled during the past eight or ten years, and in the works I visited of one company some distance south of the great Howrah Railway Station, from 110 to 120 tons of sacks called gunnies and Hessian cloth are turned out daily. That company alone employs 8000 hands. I saw the great piles of raw jute in coarse strands as it comes up from the country, and the carding machines and weaving machines. For the weaving and finishing, most of the machinery {115} comes from Dundee, and for the spinning from Leeds. Amid the ceaseless whirr, buzz and bustle of the workshops, I watched the dexterous children using their feet with almost equal skill as their hands, catching bobbins between their toes while twisting up broken threads with their fingers. I saw the main driving engines--from Hargreaves, Bolton--of 2020 horse-power, and outside in a narrow and squalid alley I saw a shrine of Juggernaut, grotesque and hideous!

I visited the great Iron Foundry of Burn & Co., who have also, 100 miles away on the East India Railway, great pottery works, whence 30-inch drain-pipes and stoneware and tesselated pavements are sent all over India. At the engineering works they employ 5000 natives and as many as sixty Europeans. Here was a batch of plate girders just finished, each 10 feet deep, the largest yet made in India. In one of the vast and deafening workshops three 10-ton overhead electric trains were moving up and down. Here were electrically-driven machines for heavy punching and shearing, and I asked the young English clerk, who was taking me round, how he liked the native people. He said:--"I like 'em well enough, but you know--the fact is--they're chronic"; and at one side of a noisy yard, on a small square landing at the top of some steps, I saw a Mohammedan at prayer.

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In the afternoon of the same day I went out by tram to Kalighat. Near one side of the road where I left the tram was a pond--an old-established washing- and drying-ground--where, from early days, the clothes of Calcutta have been severely banged. I walked under some linen flapping from clothes-lines to watch a dhobie at the water-edge beating clothes upon a ridged wooden board. He punctuated the action with such ejaculations as "Oo-er! oo-er! oo-er! oo-er! om! om! om!" and "e-ay! e-ay! ee-ay!"

These men are all independent dhobies who pay to the Government one rupee per annum for the right to wash here and to use the drying-ground.

I turned up a side road for the famous Kali Temple past a building labelled "Dispensary," with plaster falling away from its brickwork and several rows of dung-cakes patted on to the wall to dry for fuel. There were a number of loiterers hereabouts, and a man soon tacked himself on to me as "guide." I came to a temple of Siva (husband of the blood-loving Kali), where there was a well-shaped depression under a stone octagonal-pillared canopy or cupola. I went up some brick steps outside at the back, whence looking down from above I could see in the centre of the shallow well the flower-adorned lingam of the god who is {117} worshipped here with garlands and Ganges water. At each side of the narrow road were now small shops filled with large crude hand-paintings and coloured plaster figures of the terrible goddess.

Here, another would-be guide assailed me with these words:--"I will explain myself to you: follow me, please; no need to listen to other people"--and another:--

"I am an old priest here--talk with me"--and another:--

"Listen to me and I will explain all things here."

Then the third, pushing one of the others aside:--"Let him listen to me, an old priest."

I passed another Siva shrine with a copper cobra attached to a lingam. On the left of the road here was an old tank, a filthy-looking pond covered with green scum, with some coconut palms hanging over it. "Barren women bathe here and then they get children," said one of the would-be guides.

The other men now tried to get my recognition. "What is the necessity of so many to explain--I am the priest."

"_You_ the priest--ah! _who_ are you--you are the _broker_!"

They were beginning to quarrel, and I settled the matter by declaring I would have for guide the oldest among them.

I had now reached the precincts of the Temple {118} of Kali and passed under an arch into a quad where three small cows were eating accumulated leaf and flower refuse, trodden marigold garlands and scattered leaves.

The temple, which had very little beauty, was in the centre of this quad. At one corner was a Munshi tree. "If any man will be bite of a snake," said the old priest, "and come here, he will be cured from the bite; and the barren women who get no sons, they will tie stones like this"--upon the branches many small pieces of stone hung by short strings. The trunk of this tree was patched and smutched with dabs of red colour put on by pilgrims.

"And this," pointing to the building in the centre, "is Mother Kali's Temple, and the image of Mother Kali is in the inside of this temple."

The worshippers of Siva's wives, of whom Kali is the most popular, make one of three divisions of modern Hinduism, the other two being that of the Siva worshippers and that of the Vaishnavas or worshippers of Vishnu.

As I walked round to the other side I saw some women upon the ground with bleeding heads of kids and goats. These women are the servants of the temple. They and "the poor" have the heads as perquisites; the bodies of the victims are taken away by those pilgrims who brought them for sacrifice, and {119} are either cooked and eaten upon the Ganges bank or at home.

Two forked posts, one very much larger than the other, stood upright in the ground. The creatures to be killed have their heads forced down between the forks of wood--to be cut off by one blow of a sword. The larger post is for buffaloes, slaughtered one day a week; and the smaller for goats and kids, many of which are killed every day. A stream of blood trickled away from this smaller post, and a number of crows were hopping about the ground. "If you will kindly come a little earlier at time of sacrifice, that is very nice," said the priest; but I had no eagerness for that sight. It was far from the sides of Latmos--here was no sacred sward, and the poor flowers crushed into a sodden mass had long forgot the dew. Paris' voice was silent here. The deeper feelings of these people were of dread rather than veneration, the scene lacked all dignity and squalor reigned.

The man who kills is a blacksmith--a low caste man, and two pice are paid to him by the pilgrims for every goat killed. There were many naked and half-naked children about and a few mangy and diseased dogs. To most English people flesh is, of course, not the rare luxury it is to these Hindoos, and the English avoid the sight of its preparation for the table, although some still invoke the blessing of God upon its {120} consumption. The scene was disagreeable, but so also is that of the more protracted family pig-killing outside a Wiltshire labourer's cottage!

In another corner of the quad I looked at a shrine to Vishnu--the creator, and his favourite lady, Radha--and then turned down the narrow street between the temple and the river, lined with shops containing articles for the pilgrims. Some were filled with little sets at three pice each of the following articles: a small purple mat which, if wetted, will give blood-colour to water, three thin bracelets, two red and one black, and a tiny box of red powder.

Near was another shrine--a red Ganesh--Mother Kali's son--and more Siva lingams garlanded with marigolds. There were men with faces painted red near some pilgrim's restrooms, and stalls of Bengali toys such as pilgrims take home to their children. There were also on sale here English tin-made abominations with the familiar poisonous colouring, trumpets and hansom cabs--perhaps more appropriate in the vicinity of the death-delighting goddess than in Ealing or Bermondsey. The whole of this narrow street, which is long and leads all the way to the river, had been paved with flagstones by one, Gobordhour Dass, as an offering to Kali.

Juggernaut, Hanuman, and in addition to these Hindoo deities--Buddha--I saw together in one shrine. On the bank of the river are {121} some large houses for pilgrims, painted all over with various subjects. Kali, holding her head in two of her four hands, spouts blood in tall fountains: Hanuman, the monkey god, fights with the eagle god, and the wife of Vishnu plays peacefully with her husband's legs.

Near by were five trees (not pictured but actual) growing together as one, with their roots intertwined--Peepul, Bodh, Banyan, Neem and Oshhuck, their many-shaped leaves trembling in the air in an arboreal _pas de cinq_, with lingams round the base of the joined trunks. Four men passed me here carrying a dead body.

I had to walk back the same way that I had come; and as I crossed the courtyard of the Kali temple a strange figure in rags stood blowing upon a large white conch-shell a long, long strange note. A white conch-shell on the wrist marks a pilgrimage to the great seaside Siva Temple of Rameswaram in the South, but the conch-shell is also one of the marks of the Vaishnavas. "He is a mad one," said the priest; "he eats the mouse and snakes."

While I was in Calcutta I wanted to go to one of the native theatres, but the only one the hotel people knew about was a Parsee theatre in Durumtolla Street. I saw there _Kismatka Sitara_, a serious version of _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_; but I was determined to see a Bengali company, in spite of the remonstrances {122} of my table companions at the Grand Hotel, who were perfectly satisfied with the Merry Widow touring company, and declared it was not reasonable for an Englishman to visit native theatres at all.

It was a Sunday evening when I drove along Bentinck Street and approached the neighbourhood of Beadon Square. The performances at the Bengali theatres begin very early, so it was not yet dark and a soft after-sunset light irradiated the thousands of tiny shops with all the myriad kinds of work going on in them.

There were large three-storeyed houses on each side of the road, now with balconies full of women; then I passed a vast building with tall Ionic columns and two great porticoes--a Nawab's palace; then hundreds more little houses, and at last Beadon Square with its palm trees and white statue. And the warm glow fell upon the ample robes of many people walking up and down after the heat and turmoil of the day and upon many white oxen, and against the sky, rows of seated figures watched from the tops of walls and from the edges of roofs; while all the time, interwoven with humanity like the warp and woof of Indian city life, here, there and everywhere skipped and walked and flapped and scrimmaged the squawking black innumerable crows.

After I had been in to the box-office in front {123} of the theatre and purchased my ticket--an orchestra stall for three rupees--I waited in a rectangular court at one side of the building. Over the row of doors giving entrance to various parts of the house, there was a veranda, and facing this, some seats by an oval-railed enclosure containing ornamental plants. On the other side of this gambolled fifteen or twenty white rabbits behind wire-netting. One star was just showing in the sky, which was now a pale rose colour, and against it I could see the top of a coconut-palm.

Most of the baboos waiting outside the two rupee places wore socks and leather shoes and white muslin drapery over which they had a short coat and then the toga-like outer coloured robe. I was thinking of the first scene in _Cyrano de Bergerac_ when I saw someone setting up a stall of mineral waters, but was still more reminded of it when I was admitted before the other doors were opened, and watched a man lighting the lamps in the vast empty theatre.

The interior was arranged very much like most of the London theatres, with a few special differences. There was one row of orchestra stalls, then rows of seats at two rupees, and behind, the "pit" of one rupee places. When their door was opened, the pit crowd came in, laughing and scampering over the benches. I caught sight of my servant, Tambusami, among {124} them. He had bought a grand orange-red scarf with silk flowers on it for this occasion, and with his long black hair tied up behind, had a droll air of vanity mingled with restrained and decorous enjoyment.

Over the pit hung the oil-lamps, but now electric lights flashed out from the ceiling. I had thought at first there was only one floor above the ground level, a tier of loges or boxes (some of which were arranged so that their occupants could lie or sit upon cushions), with a large one in the centre facing the stage. Suddenly I realized that what I had taken to be dark hangings over the lofty wall-space above this tier of boxes was net blind, and a momentary effect of light showed me that behind it zenana ladies, safe in its reticulated seclusion from roving eyes, were examining the house with more eager curiosity than was shown by the male audience.

Behind me a boy brought two baboos some betel (green betel leaves wrapping the crushed areca nut and lime). The orchestra in this theatre was under the boxes to the left of the stalls, and the musicians in white robes were now moving to their places.

The name of the play was _Sarola_, a serious drama of modern Indian life, and fearfully pathetic--Richepin rather than Balzac--and yet a study of manners. The hero, Shoshifuzu, who {125} has hitherto lived on the bounty of a more prosperous brother, is brought by the meanness and intolerance of that brother's wife to leave his own wife Sarola and their child at home, while he journeys on foot to the distant capital to seek for remunerative employment. The journey itself is full of picturesque incident, but the greatest interest centres in the home of Shoshifuzu, where an ingenious scoundrel, Godadhar, played with great drollery and inimitable skill by Kasi Nath Chatterjee, intercepts all the supplies forwarded by the absent husband. Godadhar has far more real villainy about him than either Jingle or old Eccles, but is yet a low comedy character and is played by Chatterjee with an unction and humour that none but the elder Coquelin could have surpassed.

The day when no woman acted at the native theatres is evidently as much forgotten as it is with us; and Miss Tara Dasse, who played the intensely pathetic part of Sarola with a most tender voice, recalled to a Western mind in a protracted end some of the most appealing deaths of Sarah Bernhardt.

Another evening I went to the Minerva, also a Bengali theatre close to Beadon Square, and saw _Dolita Fronini_. A gentleman, who introduced himself to me as the stage-manager, came and sat by me for some time, kindly telling me the story of the piece, and for the sake of his {126} new interpretation of "melodrama," as well as for the light thrown on the life of any people by a study of its amusements, I made the following note of his actual words:--

"It is an opera," said the stage-manager, "like full of music and dramatic of course--there are a good many melodies, so you can call it a melodrama. Dolita Fronini is a name according only to the circumstances of the heroine, so that she is not liked by the lover and therefore she is as if a smashed snake. That snake bites very ferociously, and that snake is her. A Bengali baboo went to Bombay to see: and he waited to a friend of his who is a Mahratta, and he has been very carefully taken in to the family and is allowed to wait till he fully sees the Bombay city. And that Dolita Fronini was not named that, but her name was Bilas Bottee. She was a Bengali lady too, long living in Bombay with that Mahratta gentleman and his wife. When the Bengali gentleman was first introduced into the family, he was unaware about the family custom of the Bombay Mahrattas. There is no zenana system with them--their ladies are open to all. This baboo looked at their behaviours with a strange look, because the Bengali family system is the zenana; but that Bilas Bottee, who was an inmate long in the Mahratta house, was a Bram-maker, a follower of Brahma, and she had no zenana system also. {127} This lady Bilas Bottee loved the gentleman, that Bengali baboo, but the baboo loved the Mahratta lady. The Mahratta lady, according to their customs, behaved with the baboo freely. The baboo thought that she loved him, but she did not--she behaved freely, only not with any viciousness. The Mahratta lady explained to the baboo that her husband was examining him about the firmness of his character. When the mystery is all out and the baboo came to understand, Bilas Bottee went away as a mendicant,--Dolita Fronini!"

But the gun, which is the curtain signal at the Minerva, had sounded before this--the opera had begun and a chorus was singing. "They are singing," said the stage-manager, "that you will never see such a city in the world as Bombay. The climate is temperate here, not very bitter wind too, and there is no cold. You ought to come to walk in the morning and the evening in Bombay, and you would forget all about the world, wine is very cheap here, and if you drink a little you will be jolly all about."

Between the acts an old gentleman was introduced to me as a very famous actor--he was a Mr A. Mustaphi, and his greatest role is that of Mirzapha in the historical play, _Siraj ud Doulah_.

After another act I was entertained behind the scenes by the actor who was playing the part of the Bengali baboo. He received me in a {128} pale-blue quilted dressing-gown, and wanted me to sketch every member of the company in my notebook. His crowning attention was to send for the scene-painter of the theatre to sit on one side of me for the rest of the evening!

At these theatres I met with extreme courtesy from first to last, and shall long cherish the kind attention of a charming old gentleman from Delhi (to judge by his head-dress) who, speaking little English, showed me the miniatures of his children upon his watch-chain and went out, between the acts, to buy me a little buttonhole of roses.

The mention of roses reminds me to say a few words of the Calcutta Gardens. At one end of the Maidan, beyond the race-course, are the Zoological Gardens laid out, I know not by whom, with very good taste--worthy of Milner or Sir Joseph Paxton. The houses are handsome and commodious, the open air enclosures are both wide and spacious, and there are good collections to fill them. I especially enjoyed watching here a native of the Nepaul Terai, a big one-horned rhinoceros. On the evening of my visit he was energetic and lively after a splash in his tank. There was an irresistible comicality about the great unwieldy brute--a very Falstaff of quadrupeds--trotting at express speed.

But more beautiful is the Kampani Bagan, {129} the botanical garden on the other side of the Hooghly. In that garden there is no traffic and no dust--only a few delicate little Anglo-Indian children taking tea under the giant banyan.

March is the time to see the orchids, of which these gardens have a large variety, but few plants were in flower at the time I was there. The houses are curiously different from such as we know at Kew. They are simply wire frames covered with creepers to keep off greatest heat and heaviest rain--creepers such as the _Tinas pora crispa_ from Java, with its hanging roots. Sometimes the roof is covered with dry palm-leaves (_Phoenix sylvestris_).

There is one tree in the garden which I think quite as interesting as the world-famous great Banyan--a large handsome tree fifty or sixty feet high, with big leaves. Dr Gage, the Director of the Gardens, told me it is the only specimen of its kind known in the world, and that every leaf shown in European herbaria has come from Kampani Bagan. Unfortunately, the trunk is being honeycombed by big black boring bees (it is dangerous to go up into the tree because of them). This solitary giant is called _Anthocephalus macrophyllus_. It came many years ago from Abornia, a small island in the Malay Archipelago, and has a flower like a miniature drumstick.

In the palm-house in "Griffith Avenue" I {130} saw some double coconuts (coco de mer) from the Seychelles.

Along the waterside is a handsome row of the country almond-tree, which grows in the moister regions of Bengal and Siam. This is the _Terminalia catappa_ with large leaves and is not in the least like the almond proper.

The avenue of toddy-palms is deservedly famous, though these gardens cannot compete in grandeur with those of Peradeniya in Ceylon. In one part of the grounds (the Gardens cover 270 acres) are many screw-pines (_Pandanus utilissimus_), but best of all I liked the long avenue of stately _Oreodoxa regia_. At the head of this there is a white marble monument of singular beauty, called "Kyd's Monument." It is by the sculptor Banks, and takes the form of a Grecian urn with figures round it on a tall plinth surmounting a circular platform.

After sundown when all visitors had gone away, as the light of the afterglow bathed it in a soft effulgence, and the wide, long avenue of palms stretched away into mist, the lovely marble seemed to have found perfect setting. As the light waned again the jackals began calling and filled the air with strange melancholy.

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