Then amid a thousand jokes the tiffin-baskets were brought out, and we had a royal lunch while the tiger was “padded”—­i.e., placed on one of the unoccupied elephants; and finally we got us back to camp, where the rest of the day was devoted to dinner and cheroots.

From the tiger to the town, from the cries of jackals to those of street-venders,—­this is an easy transition in India; and it was only the late afternoon of the second day after the tiger-hunt when my companion and I were strolling along the magnificent Esplanade of Calcutta, having cut across the mountains, elephant-back, early in the morning to a station where we caught the down-train.

[Illustration:  BENGALESE OF LOW CASTE.]

Solidity, wealth, trade, ponderous ledgers, capacious ships’ bottoms, merchandise transformed to magnificence, an ample-stomached bourgeoisie,—­this is what comes to one’s mind as one faces the broad walk in front of Fort William and looks across the open space to the palaces, the domes, the columns of modern and English Calcutta; or again as one wanders along the strand in the evening when the aristocrats of commerce do congregate, and, as it were, gazette the lengths of their bank-balances in the glitter of their equipages and appointments; or again as one strolls about the great public gardens or the amplitudes of Tank Square, whose great tank of water suggests the luxury of the dwellers hereabout; or the numerous other paths of comfort which are kept so by constant lustrations from the skins of the water-bearers.  The whole situation seems that of ease and indulgence.  The very circular verandahs of the rich men’s dwellings expand like the ample vests of trustees and directors after dinner.  The city extends some four and a half miles along the left bank of the Hooghly, and its breadth between the “Circular Road” and the river is about a mile and a half.  If one cuts off from this space that part which lies south of a line drawn eastward from the Beebee Ross Ghat to the Upper Circular Road—­the northern portion thus segregated being the native town—­one has a veritable city of palaces; and when to these one adds the magnificent suburbs lying beyond the old circumvallation of the “Mahratta Ditch”—­Chitpore, Nundenbagh, Bobar, Simla, Sealdah, Entally, Ballygunge, Bhovaneepore, Allypore, Kidderpore—­together with the riverward-sloping lawns and stately mansions of “Garden Reach” on the sea-side of town, and the great dockyards and warehouses of the right bank of the river opposite the city, one has enclosed a space which may probably vie with any similar one in the world for the appearances and the realities of wealth within it.