I was overpowered by feelings of the most disagreeable kind the first time I used a palanquin.  I could not help feeling how degrading it was to human beings to employ them as beasts of burden.

The palanquins are five feet long and three feet high, with sliding doors and jalousies:  in the inside they are provided with mattresses and cushions, so that a person can lie down in them as in a bed.  Four porters are enough to carry one of them about the town, but eight are required for a longer excursion.  They relieve each other at short intervals, and run so quickly that they go four miles in an hour or even in three-quarters of an hour.  These palanquins being painted black, looked like so many stretchers carrying corpses to the churchyard or patients to the hospital.

On the road to the town, I was particularly struck with the magnificent gauths (piazzas), situated on the banks of the Hoogly, and from which broad flights of steps lead down to the river.  Before these gauths are numerous pleasure and other boats.

The most magnificent palaces lay around in the midst of splendid gardens, into one of which the palanquin-bearers turned, and set me down under a handsome portico before the house of Herr Heilgers, to whom I had brought letters of recommendation.  The young and amiable mistress of the house greeted me as a countrywoman (she was from the north and I from the south of Germany), and received me most cordially.  I was lodged with Indian luxury, having a drawing-room, a bed-room, and a bath-room especially assigned to me.

I happened to arrive in Calcutta at the most unfavourable period possible.  Three years of unfruitfulness through almost the whole of Europe had been followed by a commercial crisis, which threatened the town with entire destruction.  Every mail from Europe brought intelligence of some failure, in which the richest firms here were involved.  No merchant could say, “I am worth so much;”—­the next post might inform him that he was a beggar.  A feeling of dread and anxiety had seized every family.  The sums already lost in England and this place were reckoned at thirty millions of pounds sterling, and yet the crisis was far from being at an end.

Misfortunes of this kind fall particularly hard upon persons who, like the Europeans here, have been accustomed to every kind of comfort and luxury.  No one can have any idea of the mode of life in India.  Each family has an entire palace, the rent of which amounts to two hundred rupees (20 pounds), or more, a month.  The household is composed of from twenty-five to thirty servants; namely—­two cooks, a scullion, two water-carriers, four servants to wait at table, four housemaids, a lamp-cleaner, and half-a-dozen seis or grooms.  Besides this, there are at least six horses, to every one of which there is a separate groom; two coachmen, two gardeners, a nurse and servant for each child, a lady’s maid, a girl to wait