nter and go to Delhi and Simla
for the summer, selling brocades, embroideries, shawls, wood and
ivory carvings and other native art work which are very tempting
to tourists. Several dealers in jewels from Delhi and other cities
spend the holidays in order to catch the native princes, who
are the greatest purchasers of precious stones in the world.
Several of them have collections more valuable and extensive than
any of the imperial families of Europe. Prices of all curios,
embroideries and objects of art are much higher in Calcutta than
in the cities of northern India, and everybody told us it was
the poorest place to buy such things.

The most imposing building upon the Chowringhee, the principal
street, is the Imperial Museum, which was founded nearly a hundred
years ago by the Asiatic Society, and was taken over by the
government in 1866. It is a splendid structure around a central
quadrangle 300 feet square with colonnades, fountains, plants and
flowers. Little effort has been made to obtain contributions from
other countries, but no other collection of Indian antiquities,
ethnology, archaeology, mineralogy and other natural sciences can
compare with it. It is under the special patronage of the viceroy,
who takes an active interest in extending its usefulness and
increasing its treasures, while Lady Curzon is the patroness of
the school of design connected with it. In this school about three
hundred young men are studying the industrial arts. Comparatively
little attention is given to the fine arts. There are a few native
portrait painters, and I have seen some clever water colors from
the brushes of natives. But in the industrial arts they excel,
and this institute is maintained under government patronage for
the purpose of training the eyes and the hands of designers and
artisans. In the same group of buildings are the geological survey
and other scientific bureaus of the government, which are quite
as progressive and learned as our own. A little farther up the
famous street are the headquarters of the Asiatic Society, one of
the oldest and most enterprising learned societies in the world,
whose journals and proceedings for the last century are a library
in themselves and contain about all that anybody would ever want
to know concerning the history, literature, antiquities, resources
and people of India. Here also is a collection of nearly twenty
thousand manuscripts in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Hindustani
and