imposed on European buildings by a tropical climate.  The Marquess of Wellesley built Government House over a hundred years ago on the model of Kedleston, and it is still the stateliest official residence in British India.  Fort William with Olive’s ramparts and fosses is still almost untouched, and with an ever-expanding Walhalla of bronze or marble Governors and Viceroys and Commanders-in-Chief, and at the farther end the white marble walls and domes of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hall—­the one noble monument we have built in India—­at last nearing completion, the broad expanse of Calcutta’s incomparable Maidan is, even more than our London parks, the green playfield and the vital lung of the whole city.  Along and behind Chowringhee there are still a few of the old-time mansions of Thackeray’s “nabobs,” with their deep, pillared verandahs standing well off from the road, each within its discreet “compound,” but they are all rapidly making room for “eligible residences,” more opulent perhaps but more closely packed, or for huge blocks of residential flats, even less adapted to the climate.  The great business quarter round Dalhousie Square has been steadily rebuilt on a scale of massive magnificence scarcely surpassed in the city of London, and many of the shops compare with those of our West End.  The river, too, all along the Garden Reach and far below is often almost as crowded as the Pool of London, with ocean-going steamers waiting to load or unload their cargoes as well as with lumbering native sailing ships and the ferries that ply ceaselessly between the different quarters of the city on both banks of the Hugli.  The continuous roar of traffic in the busy streets, the crowded tram-cars, the motors and taxis jostling the ancient bullock-carts, the surging crowds in the semi-Europeanised native quarters, even the pall of smoke that tells of many modern industrial activities are not quite so characteristic of new India as, when I was last there, the sandwich-men with boards inviting a vote for this or that candidate in the elections to the new Indian Councils.

In all the strenuous life and immense wealth of this great city, to which European enterprise first gave and still gives the chief impulse, Indians are taking an increasing share.  The Bengalees themselves still hold very much aloof from modern developments of trade and industry, but they were the first to appreciate the value of Western education, and the Calcutta University with all its shortcomings has maintained the high position which Lord Dalhousie foreshadowed for it nearly seventy years ago.  In art and literature the modern Bengalee has often known how to borrow from the West without sacrificing either his own originality or the traditions of his race or the spirit of his creed.  Some of the finest Bengalee brains have taken for choice to the legal profession and have abundantly justified themselves both as judges in the highest court of the province and as barristers and