ny years afterwards, in
front of these shops were open sewers, over which customers had to pass
on slabs of stone. Amidst houses for Europeans, even in the most
aristocratic part of the city, were native houses of every description,
many of them miserable grass huts.

Since the time of which I speak, some forty-five years ago, Calcutta has
been greatly improved. It has been drained, supplied with good water,
instead of being dependent on great open tanks, to which all had access,
which no arrangement could keep tolerably pure, and is lit with gas.
Open sewers are no longer to be seen, and from the best parts of the
city many native houses have disappeared. The changes effected must
conduce immensely to the health and comfort of the inhabitants. There is
no part of India, we suppose, free from the plague of the musquito, but
in all my Indian life I have not been so much tormented in any place by
it as I have been in Calcutta. It adds insult to injury. If it would
only bite, sharp though its bite be, one could put up with it; but
before it bites, and after, it goes on buzzing, as if mocking you, and
evades every attempt to catch it. The last time we were there musquitoes
were comparatively few, and they seemed to have lost much of their
former mischievous vigour. We suppose the improved sanitary arrangements
have not agreed with them.

When in Calcutta everything reminded us that we had left our own country
behind, though not all our own people. We saw them on every side, but
they were a mere handful in the midst of a strange people in a strange
land, where man and nature presented entirely new aspects. The look of
the people, the exceedingly scanty dress of the labouring class, and the
long flowing robes of those in better circumstances, the marks on the
foreheads and arms of the Hindus, showing the gods whose worshippers
they were, their processions with noisy, unmusical music, the public
buildings of the people, the mosques of the Muhammadans, and the temples
of the Hindus, with a church here and there to show that Christianity
had also its shrines--all brought to our view characteristics of the
great land on which we had entered. Bombay, since the opening of the
Suez Canal, has made progress which somewhat affects the pre-eminence of
Calcutta among the cities of India, but it still remains the capital of
British India--I ought rather to say of India--and its position will
continue to make it, what it has been in the