uels about her in the cockpit with
their dirks.

Before we arrived in Bengal she talked to me much about her parents,
who had been settled at Fort William for nearly twenty years. It was a
long time since she had had news of them, she told me, but when she
last heard her father was prospering in his business, which was that
of a drug factor, not in the civil service of the East Indian Company,
but trading under their licence, and shipping his merchandise in their
bottoms. So much she knew, but nothing besides, and it was with as
much curiosity as myself that she saw the Sunderbunds drawing near,
and our sloop anchoring off Falta to wait for a pilot up the river.

The Hooghley, famous as it is, is only one of the mouths of that great
river the Ganges, sacred and renowned throughout Indostan. Yet it is
upwards of forty miles long, for so great was the distance which
separated us from our destination. By means of a fair wind we
accomplished this difficult navigation, dangerous on account of the
numerous shoals, in a very few hours, passing on our way the fort of
Budge-Budge, where the Company kept a small garrison.

The scene along the banks of the river was most strange to me at this
time, and made an impression not easy to be effaced. The trees which
overhung the most part of the banks, of a character quite unlike
those we have in Norfolk, were gloomy and forbidding in the extreme;
but when we came to one of the people of the country's villages, and
saw the men dressed in gay turbans, the women walking about with
curious earthen vessels on their heads, and the stark naked black
children playing in the water, I was altogether bewildered, and could
scarcely credit that I, who saw these things and had come to dwell
amongst them, was the same boy who had been bred up so peacefully in
that English village among the flat meadows bordered by the shallow
broad.

However, we came at last to that place since so celebrated, though
then considered only as the third among the Company's settlements in
the East; I mean Fort William. The fort itself was at this date of no
great size or consequence; but in the neighbourhood along the river
bank were many fine warehouses erected by the English. In the rear of
these was built the native town, which the Moors call Calcutta. Here
the houses are generally mean and dirty; but some of the rich Indians
lived in very noble style, having fine gardens round their houses,
ornamented with founta