ipal Board list is choked with the names of
natives--men of the breed born in and raised off this surfeited
muck-heap! They own property, these amiable Aryans on the Municipal and
the Bengal Legislative Council. Launch a proposal to tax them on that
property, and they naturally howl. They also howl up-country, but there
the halls for mass-meetings are few, and the vernacular papers fewer,
and with a strong Secretary and a President whose favour is worth the
having and whose wrath is undesirable, men are kept clean despite
themselves, and may not poison their neighbours. Why, asks a savage, let
them vote at all? They can put up with this filthiness. They _cannot_
have any feelings worth caring a rush for. Let them live quietly and
hide away their money under our protection, while we tax them till they
know through their purses the measure of their neglect in the past, and
when a little of the smell has been abolished, let us bring them back
again to talk and take the credit of enlightenment. The better classes
own their broughams and barouches; the worse can shoulder an Englishman
into the kennel and talk to him as though he were a cook. They can refer
to an English lady as an _aurat_[12]; they are permitted a freedom--not
to put it too coarsely--of speech which, if used by an Englishman toward
an Englishman, would end in serious trouble. They are fenced and
protected and made inviolate. Surely they might be content with all
those things without entering into matters which they cannot, by the
nature of their birth, understand.

[12] woman.

Now, whether all this genial diatribe be the outcome of an unbiassed
mind or the result first of sickness caused by that ferocious stench,
and secondly of headache due to day-long smoking to drown the stench,
is an open question. Anyway, Calcutta is a fearsome place for a man not
educated up to it.

A word of advice to other barbarians. Do not bring a north-country
servant into Calcutta. He is sure to get into trouble, because he does
not understand the customs of the city. A Punjabi in this place for the
first time esteems it his bounden duty to go to the _Ajaib-ghar_--the
Museum. Such an one has gone and is even now returned very angry and
troubled in the spirit. "I went to the Museum," says he, "and no one
gave me any abuse. I went to the market to buy my food, and then I sat
upon a seat. There came an orderly who said, 'Go away, I want to sit
here.' I said, 'I am here first.' H