Of all the Christian places of worship, the English Cathedral is the most magnificent.  It is built in the Gothic style, with a fine large tower rising above half-a-dozen smaller ones.  There are other churches with Gothic towers, but these edifices are all extremely simple in the interior, with the exception of the Armenian church, which has the wall near the altar crowded with pictures in gold frames.

The notorious “Black Hole,” in which the Rajah Suraja Dowla cast 150 of the principal prisoners when he obtained possession of Calcutta in 1756, is at present changed into a warehouse.  At the entrance stands an obelisk fifty feet high, and on it are inscribed the names of his victims.

The Botanical Garden lies five miles distant from the town.  It was founded in the year 1743, but is more like a natural park than a garden, as it is by no means so remarkable for its collection of flowers and plants as for the number of trees and shrubs, which are distributed here and there with studied negligence in the midst of large grass-plots.  A neat little monument, with a marble bust, is erected to the memory of the founder.  The most remarkable objects are two banana-trees.  These trees belong to the fig-tree species, and sometimes attain a height of forty feet.  The fruit is very small, round, and of a dark-red; it yields oil when burnt.  When the trunk has reached an elevation of about fifteen feet, a number of small branches shoot out horizontally in all directions, and from these quantity of threadlike roots descend perpendicularly to the ground, in which they soon firmly fix themselves.  When they are sufficiently grown, they send out shoots like the parent trunk; and this process is repeated ad infinitum, so that it is easy to understand how a single tree may end by forming a whole forest, in which thousands may find a cool and shady retreat.  This tree is held sacred by the Hindoos.  They erect altars to the god Rama beneath its shade, and there, too, the Brahmin instructs his scholars.

The oldest of these two trees, together with its family, already describes a circumference of more than 600 feet, and the original trunk measures nearly fifty feet round.

Adjoining the Botanical Garden is the Bishop’s College, in which the natives are trained as missionaries.  After the Governor’s Palace, it is the finest building in Calcutta, and consists of two main buildings and three wings.  One of the main buildings is occupied by an extremely neat chapel.  The library, which is a noble-looking room, contains a rich collection of the works of the best authors, and is thrown open to the pupils; but their industry does not appear to equal the magnificence of the arrangements, for, on taking a book from the bookcase, I immediately let it fall again and ran to the other end of the room; a swarm of bees had flown upon me from out the bookcase.

The dining and sleeping rooms, as well as all the other apartments, are so richly and conveniently furnished, that a person might easily suppose that the establishment had been founded for the sons of the richest English families, who were so accustomed to comfort from their tenderest infancy that they were desirous of transplanting it to all quarters of the globe; but no one would ever imagine the place had been built for “the labourers in the vineyard of the Lord.”