is a hard journey, both going and coming, and a traveler gets
impatient when he finds that it takes him from four o'clock in
the afternoon of one day until nearly two o'clock of the next to
make a journey of 246 miles. He leaves Calcutta with the thinnest
clothing he can buy, but when he arrives there he is glad that
he brought his overcoat and gloves, and pulls a second blanket
over himself at night. At the same time it is not so cold in
Darjeeling as one would expect from the altitude of 7,400 feet
above the sea, and the latitude, which is about 27 degrees 50
minutes. You travel from four o'clock till seven upon a railway
of ordinary gauge, cross the Ganges on a steamboat for an hour,
taking your dinner while afloat; change into a three-foot gauge
train until half-past four in the morning, when you are routed
out, given a cup of coffee and a roll, and transferred to a baby
carriage on wheels which crawls up the foothills of the Himalayas
at the rate of six miles an hour.

The track is only two feet gauge, with forty-pound rails, which
have been laid upon the ancient highway over which the caravans
between China and India have passed for thirty centuries. It
winds in and out of gorges and defiles and at several points
the engineers have had to cut a foothold for it on the edges of
tremendous precipices. It doubles on itself repeatedly, describes
the letter S and the letter Z and the figure 8, and zigzags about
so recklessly that the engineer puts his locomotive first at one
end of the train and then at the other. Englishmen who write
books on India assert that it is the grandest railway journey in
the world, but we can show them several quite as picturesque and
attractive in our own beloved Rocky Mountains. The only advantage
they have over us there is the superior height of the mountains
and the superior size of the trees. But you must remember that
our country is young yet, and India is one of the oldest nations
in the world.

The first few miles of track lie in a dense jungle, with vegetation
of truly tropical luxuriance. Cane stalks grow fifty and sixty feet
high, the grass is fifteen feet deep, beautiful bamboo trees, whose
foliage is as fine as feathers, and palms which have plumage like
a peacock and a bird of paradise, lift their proud and haughty
heads above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is
the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs,
buffaloes, deer and all sorts of be