to
place themselves in adoring procession and to debase themselves with
the absurd rites of frenzy and unreason. Nor do I forget the fact that
my countrymen are broken up into hundreds of sects, and their language
frittered into hundreds of dialects. Yet, as I said, we are full of
hope, and there can be no man so bold as to limit the capabilities of
that blood which flows in English veins as well as in Hindu. Somehow
or other, India is now not so gloomy a topic to read of or to talk
of as it used to be. The recent investigations of Indian religion and
philosophy have set many European minds upon trains of thought which
are full of novelty and of promise. India is not the only land--you
who are from America know it full well--where the current orthodoxy
has become wholly unsatisfactory to many of the soberest and most
practically earnest men; and I please myself with believing that it is
now not wholly extravagant to speak of a time when these two hundred
millions of industrious, patient, mild-hearted, yet mistaken Hindus
may be found leaping joyfully forward out of their old shackles toward
the larger purposes which reveal themselves in the light of progress."

At the close of our conversation, which was long and to me intensely
interesting, the babou informed us that he had recently become
interested with a company of Englishmen in reclaiming one of the
numerous and hitherto wholly unused islands in the Sunderbunds for the
purpose of devoting it to the culture of rice and sugar-cane, and
that if we cared to penetrate some of the wildest and most picturesque
portions of that strange region he would be glad to place at our
disposal one of the boats of the company, which we would find lying at
Port Canning. I eagerly accepted the proposition; and on the next day,
taking the short railway which connects Calcutta and Port Canning, we
quickly arrived at the latter point, and proceeded to bestow ourselves
comfortably in the boat for a lazy voyage along the winding streams
and canals which intersect the great marshes. It was not long after
leaving Port Canning ere we were in the midst of the aquatic plants,
the adjutants, the herons, the thousand sorts of water-birds, the
crocodiles, which here abound.

[Illustration: THE PORT OF CALCUTTA.]

The Sunderbunds--as the natives term that alluvial region which
terminates the delta of the Ganges--can scarcely be considered either
land or sea, but rather a multitudinous reticulatio