l of his baby niece, who came to feed the crows with the
toast which accompanied his early cup of tea; a ceremony during which
he had much ado to protect the child from the advances of a multitude of
birds, each almost as big as herself, which hopped and fluttered round
her as she stood on the steps of the verandah. When the sun drove him
indoors, (which happened sooner than he had promised himself, before he
had learned by experience what the hot season was,) he went to his bath
and toilette, and then to breakfast; "at which we support nature under
the exhausting effects of the climate by means of plenty of eggs,
mango-fish, snipe-pies, and frequently a hot beefsteak. My cook is
renowned through Calcutta for his skill. He brought me attestations of
a long succession of gourmands, and among them one from Lord Dalhousie,
who pronounced him decidedly the first artist in Bengal. [Lord
Dalhousie, the father of the Governor-General, was Commander-In-Chief
in India during the years 1830 and 1831.] This great man, and his two
assistants, I am to have for thirty rupees a month. While I am on the
subject of the cuisine, I may as well say all that I have to say about
it at once. The tropical fruits are wretched. The best of them is
inferior to our apricot or gooseberry. When I was a child, I had a
notion of its being the most exquisite of treats to eat plantains and
yams, and to drink palm-wine. How I envied my father for having enjoyed
these luxuries! I have now enjoyed them all, and I have found like much
greater men on much more important occasions, that all is vanity. A
plantain is very like a rotten pear,--so like that I would lay twenty to
one that a person blindfolded would not discover the difference. A yam
is better. It is like an indifferent potato. I tried palm-wine at a
pretty village near Madras, where I slept one night. I told Captain
Barron that I had been curious to taste that liquor ever since I first
saw, eight or nine and twenty years ago, the picture of the negro
climbing the tree in Sierra Leone. The next morning I was roused by a
servant, with a large bowl of juice fresh from the tree. I drank it, and
found it very like ginger-beer in which the ginger has been sparingly
used."

Macaulay necessarily spent away from home the days on which the Supreme
Council, or the Law Commission, held their meetings; but the rest of his
work, legal, literary, and educational, he carried on in the quiet of
his library. Now an