of their race, will restore them. The utmost
care is of no avail. Even removing them to higher table-lands in the
hill country has no saving effect. An English gentleman and his wife,
who had long resided at Lahore, told us the same; they being also
separated from their children, who had been born in India, but
necessarily sent home to England to restore their fading health. This
singular peculiarity is so well known, that its fatal results are now
promptly guarded against by the one and only resort,--of parents and
children submitting to separation.

The city is said to contain a million of inhabitants, but this seemed an
excessive computation. The frail character of the native houses, in the
section of Calcutta occupied by Indians, may be judged of by the fact
that the cyclone, which visited the place the year after that of the
famine at Orissa, destroyed over thirty thousand of their houses; and,
three years later, in 1870, another cyclone was equally destructive
among these dwellings. The Hoogly River is visited, during the monsoons,
about the last of April, by a tidal wave, which dashes up from the sea
at a speed of twenty miles an hour, causing much destruction. Ships
lying off the city often part their cables, and are driven on shore;
while many small craft, along the eighty miles of river course, are not
unfrequently destroyed altogether.

Taking the cars of the Eastern Bengal Railway, we started for
Darjeeling, in the extreme north of India, a distance of about four
hundred miles from Calcutta. At Damookdea the Ganges was crossed, and
the journey resumed by the North Bengal State Railway. At Siliguri the
Narrow Gauge Himalayan Railway was taken, by which to ascend the
mountains, and a wonderful piece of engineering it was found to be,
doubling upon itself frequently in a distance of two hundred feet; in
one place the train passing over a bridge which it had passed under a
few minutes before. The railroad running up Mount Washington, in New
Hampshire, though more precipitous, is less remarkable. The wild,
extensive scenery on the route was a constant reminder of the Sierra
Nevada mountains, through which we had passed by moonlight, in far-off
America. As we progressed upwards, flocks of Tibet goats began to
appear, and a hardier race of men and women than those we had left below
on the plains of Hindostan. The road was being much improved, and
laborers were busy all day along the route, consisting of men and w