as carried to its various destinations in sailing-ships, and
there were rows and rows of splendid full-rigged ships and barques
lying moored in the Hooghly along the whole length of the Maidan. The
line must have extended for two miles, and I never tired of looking at
these beautiful vessels with their graceful lines and huge spars, all
clean and spick and span with green and white paint, the ubiquitous
Calcutta crows perched in serried ranks on their yards. To my mind a
full-rigged ship is the most beautiful object man has ever devised, and
when the dusk was falling, with every spar and rope outlined in black
against the vivid crimson of the short-lived Indian sunset, the long
line of shipping made a glorious picture. Nineteen years later every
sailing-ship had disappeared from the Hooghly, and in their place were
rows of unsightly, rusty-sided iron tanks, with squat polemasts and
ugly funnels vomiting black smoke. A tramp-steamer has its uses, no
doubt, but it is hardly a thing of beauty. Ichabod! Ichabod!

Calcutta is fortunate in having so fine a lung as the great stretch of
the Maidan. It has been admirably planted and laid out, with every palm
of tree of aggressively Indian appearance carefully excluded from its
green expanse, so it wears a curiously home-like appearance. The Maidan
is very reminiscent of Hyde Park, though almost double its size. There
is one spot, where the Gothic spire of the cathedral emerges from a
mass of greenery, with a large sheet of water in the foreground, which
recalls exactly the view over Bayswater from the bridge spanning the
Serpentine.

Considering that Calcutta Cathedral was built in 1840; that it was
designed by an Engineer officer, and not by an architect; that its
"Gothic" is composed of cast-iron and stucco instead of stone, it is
really not such a bad building. The great size of its interior gives it
a certain dignity, and owing to the generosity of the European
community, it is most lavishly adorned with marbles, mosaics, and
stained glass. It possesses the finest organ in Asia, and a really
excellent choir, the men Europeans, the boys being Eurasians. These
small half-castes have very sweet voices, with a curious and not
unpleasing metallic timbre about them. At evening service in the
cathedral, should one ignore such details as the rows of electric
punkahs, the temperature, and the dingy complexions of the choir-boys,
it was almost impossible to realise that one was not i