gymkhanas where every one knows everybody else, or the
chastened intoxication of dances where all engagements are booked, in
ink, ten days ahead, and where everybody's antecedents are as patent as
his or her method of waltzing. We have been deprived of our inheritance.
The men at home are enjoying it all, not knowing how fair and rich it
is, and we at the most can only fly westward for a few months and gorge
what, properly speaking, should take seven or eight or ten luxurious
years. That is the lost heritage of London; and the knowledge of the
forfeiture, wilful or forced, comes to most men at times and seasons,
and they get cross.

Calcutta holds out false hopes of some return. The dense smoke hangs
low, in the chill of the morning, over an ocean of roofs, and, as the
city wakes, there goes up to the smoke a deep, full-throated boom of
life and motion and humanity. For this reason does he who sees Calcutta
for the first time hang joyously out of the _ticca-ghari_[11] and sniff
the smoke, and turn his face toward the tumult, saying: "This is, at
last, some portion of my heritage returned to me. This is a City. There
is life here, and there should be all manner of pleasant things for the
having, across the river and under the smoke."

[11] hired carriage.

The litany is an expressive one and exactly describes the first emotions
of a wandering savage adrift in Calcutta. The eye has lost its sense of
proportion, the focus has contracted through overmuch residence in
up-country stations--twenty minutes' canter from hospital to
parade-ground, you know--and the mind has shrunk with the eye. Both say
together, as they take in the sweep of shipping above and below the
Hugli Bridge: "Why, this is London! This is the docks. This is Imperial.
This is worth coming across India to see!"

Then a distinctly wicked idea takes possession of the mind: "What a
divine--what a heavenly place to _loot_!" This gives place to a much
worse devil--that of Conservatism. It seems not only a wrong but a
criminal thing to allow natives to have any voice in the control of such
a city--adorned, docked, wharfed, fronted, and reclaimed by Englishmen,
existing only because England lives, and dependent for its life on
England. All India knows of the Calcutta Municipality; but has any one
thoroughly investigated the Big Calcutta Stink? There is only one.
Benares is fouler in point of concentrated, pent-up muck, and there are
local stenches in Peshawar