The colonel remained at Dhacca till February 4, awaiting ulterior orders from headquarters, and had, consequently, abundance of leisure for making himself acquainted with the place and its people.  These researches, however, were not always unattended with danger; for on one occasion, while viewing the city from an elevated building, a piece of plaster was struck from the cornice near where he stood by a matchlock ball—­a delicate hint that the Mussulmans disliked being overlooked.  The Nawab, apparently the son of Bishop Heber’s acquaintance, Shumseddowlah, still resides in the palace of his ancestors, but is described as an extravagant, uneducated youth, who has mortgaged away his income from 5000 to 200 rupees per mensem—­that is, from L.6000 to L.240 per annum.  The inhabitants were a mixture of almost all the creeds and nations of Asia—­Chinese, Thibetans, Mugs from Arracan, Burmese, Malays, etc.; but the great majority are Hindoos, whose sanguinary goddess Kalee is adored in not less than fifty temples.  The Greeks and Armenians also have each a church, the services of which, as described by the colonel, are conducted in much the same form as at Constantinople:—­“But among the (Armenian) matrons only was any appearance of devotion visible; one of them, most gorgeously appareled in the Armenian fashion, with a magnificent tiara of jewels on her brow, and wearing a superb shawl, threw herself on the ground, with her head sunk between her arms, towards the altar, and remained in that position nearly five minutes.  The others, being dressed a l’Anglaise, with stiff stays and fashionable bonnets, could not afford to indulge in such a position.”  The Armenians were formerly numerous in Dhacca, and are still an influential and wealthy body; the Greeks are now “few and far between,” but in the palmy days of Dhacca they were a flourishing community.

Dhacca was a place abounding in strange characters from all parts of the world; and among others whom the colonel encountered, was a singular specimen of a cosmopolite, a native of Fez, who called himself a Moslem, but whom our friend vehemently suspected of being a Jew.  He had been almost as great a traveller as his countryman the famous Sheikh Ebn Batuta, whose wanderings are immortalized in the pages of Maga,[10] and came last from Moulmein, with a cargo of black pepper and rubies.  He had resided seventeen years in India, and proposed to the colonel, whom he claimed as a brother, “since from his own home he could reach England in ten days,” that they should jointly freight a vessel with valuables, and go home together!  And, among other scattered facts, a casual encounter with some Chinese in the employ of the Assam Tea Company, whom the colonel considerably astonished by addressing them in their own language, introduces “the very curious fact,” that at Tipperah, a civil station not more than fifty or sixty miles from Dhacca, the natives have from time immemorial used the tea which grows there abundantly,