and dancing for the young, and
cards for the old, when the party assembled happened to be large
enough; and a few who had been previously invited stayed supper. I
often visited the old Begam Johnstone at this hour, and met at her
house the first people in the country, for all people, including the
Governor-General himself, delighted to honour this old lady, the
widow of a Governor-General of India, and the mother-in-law of a
Prime Minister of England.[5] She was at Murshidabad when Siraj-ud-
daula marched from that place at the head of the army that took and
plundered Calcutta, and caused so many Europeans to perish in the
Black Hole; and she was herself saved from becoming a member of his
seraglio, or perishing with the lest, by the circumstance of her
being far gone in her pregnancy, which caused her to be made over to
a Dutch factory.[6]

She had been a very beautiful woman, and had been several times
married; the pictures of all her husbands being hung round her noble
drawing-room in Calcutta, covered during the day with crimson cloth
to save them from the dust, and uncovered at night only on particular
occasions. One evening Mrs. Crommelin, a friend of mine, pointing to
one of them, asked the old lady his name. 'Really, I cannot at this
moment tell you, my dear; my memory is very bad,' (striking her
forehead with her right hand, as she leaned with her left arm in Mrs.
Crommelin's,) 'but I shall recollect in a few minutes.' The old
lady's last husband was a clergyman, Mr. Johnstone, whom she found
too gay, and persuaded to go home upon an annuity of eight hundred a
year, which she settled upon him for life. The bulk of her fortune
went to Lord Liverpool; the rest to her grandchildren, the Ricketts,
Watts, and others.

Since those days the modes of intercourse in India have much altered.
Society at all the stations beyond the three capitals of Calcutta,
Madras, and Bombay, is confined almost exclusively to the members of
the civil and military services, who seldom remain long at the same
station--the military officers hardly ever more than three years, and
the civil hardly ever so long. At disagreeable stations the civil
servants seldom remain so many months. Every newcomer calls in the
forenoon upon all that are at the station when he arrives, and they
return his call at the same hour soon after. If he is a married man,
the married men upon whom he has called take their wives to call upon
his; and he takes his t