Darjeeling is a sanitarium of the greatest benefit to the people of India.  The town is made up chiefly of hotels, hospitals and summer bungalows belonging to the mercantile class of Calcutta.  Few officials except military officers ever go there.  The official society follows the viceroy to Simla, where the summer is always gay, but those who seek health and rest only and are fond of nature prefer Darjeeling.  The hotels are good, there are plenty of boarding houses, there are hospitals for all sorts of infirmities, and perhaps there is no other place in the world with such an ideal climate within a day’s travel of the tropics.  The hotels, villas, boarding houses, hospitals and asylums are scattered all over the hillside without regularity of arrangement.  Wherever a level spot has been found some kind of a house has been erected, usually without any architectural taste, and the common use of corrugated iron for building material has almost spoiled the looks of the place.  There is plenty of timber, and the great mountains are built of stone, so that there is no excuse for the atrocious structures that have been erected there.

Everybody who comes is expected to get up at half-past 3 in the morning in order to see the sun rise.  Everything is arranged by the managers of the hotel.  They have fixed the sunrise at that hour in order to compel their guests to make the greatest possible effort to see it because they will thus remember the incident, and the experience will remain longer in their memory.  They give you a cup of coffee and a roll, and, if you insist upon it, you can get an egg, although the cook is not inclined to be obliging at that hour in the morning.  They put you in a sort of sedan chair called a “dandy,” and you are carried by four men seven miles up the mountains to a point 12,000 feet above the sea.  From there you can look upon the most impressive spectacle that human eye has ever witnessed, the rising of the sun over an amphitheater surrounded by the highest group of peaks on the globe.  Their snow-covered summits are illuminated gradually, beginning at the top, as if a searchlight were slowly turned upon them.  Mount Everest stands in the center, but is so much farther away that it does not seem so much higher than the rest.

There is little mountain climbing in India compared with the Alps, because the distances and the difficulties are so great.  A Boston gentleman and his wife made the ascent of Mount Everest in 1904, and it is claimed that they went higher than anyone had ever gone before.

Darjeeling is not a large town, but it is filled with interesting people, and on Sunday a market is held in the principal bazaar which is declared to be the most picturesque and fascinating in all India.  Throngs of natives in quaint costumes come from all parts of the country around, representatives of tribes which do not often stray so far away from their homes.  They come from Nepaul, Thibet, Sikkim and the surrounding