The native bazaars are like those in other Indian cities, although not so interesting.  Calcutta has comparatively a small native trade, although it has a million of population.  The shops of Delhi, Lahore, Jeypore, Lucknow, Benares and other cities are much more attractive.  In the European quarter are some curio dealers, who stop there for the winter and go to Delhi and Simla for the summer, selling brocades, embroideries, shawls, wood and ivory carvings and other native art work which are very tempting to tourists.  Several dealers in jewels from Delhi and other cities spend the holidays in order to catch the native princes, who are the greatest purchasers of precious stones in the world.  Several of them have collections more valuable and extensive than any of the imperial families of Europe.  Prices of all curios, embroideries and objects of art are much higher in Calcutta than in the cities of northern India, and everybody told us it was the poorest place to buy such things.

The most imposing building upon the Chowringhee, the principal street, is the Imperial Museum, which was founded nearly a hundred years ago by the Asiatic Society, and was taken over by the government in 1866.  It is a splendid structure around a central quadrangle 300 feet square with colonnades, fountains, plants and flowers.  Little effort has been made to obtain contributions from other countries, but no other collection of Indian antiquities, ethnology, archaeology, mineralogy and other natural sciences can compare with it.  It is under the special patronage of the viceroy, who takes an active interest in extending its usefulness and increasing its treasures, while Lady Curzon is the patroness of the school of design connected with it.  In this school about three hundred young men are studying the industrial arts.  Comparatively little attention is given to the fine arts.  There are a few native portrait painters, and I have seen some clever water colors from the brushes of natives.  But in the industrial arts they excel, and this institute is maintained under government patronage for the purpose of training the eyes and the hands of designers and artisans.  In the same group of buildings are the geological survey and other scientific bureaus of the government, which are quite as progressive and learned as our own.  A little farther up the famous street are the headquarters of the Asiatic Society, one of the oldest and most enterprising learned societies in the world, whose journals and proceedings for the last century are a library in themselves and contain about all that anybody would ever want to know concerning the history, literature, antiquities, resources and people of India.  Here also is a collection of nearly twenty thousand manuscripts in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Hindustani and other oriental languages.

There is comparatively little poverty in Calcutta, considering the enormous population and the conditions in which they live.  There are, however, several hundred thousand people who would starve to death upon their present incomes if they lived in the United States or in any of the European countries, but there it costs so little to sustain life and a penny goes so far that what an American working man would call abject destitution is an abundance.  Give a Hindu a few farthings for food and a sheet of white cotton for clothing and he will be comfortable and contented.