Here, book in hand, and in dressing-gown and slippers, he would spend those two hours after sun-rise which Anglo-Indian gentlemen devote to riding, and Anglo-Indian ladies to sleeping off the arrears of the sultry night.  Regularly, every morning, his studies were broken in upon by the arrival of his baby niece, who came to feed the crows with the toast which accompanied his early cup of tea; a ceremony during which he had much ado to protect the child from the advances of a multitude of birds, each almost as big as herself, which hopped and fluttered round her as she stood on the steps of the verandah.  When the sun drove him indoors, (which happened sooner than he had promised himself, before he had learned by experience what the hot season was,) he went to his bath and toilette, and then to breakfast; “at which we support nature under the exhausting effects of the climate by means of plenty of eggs, mango-fish, snipe-pies, and frequently a hot beefsteak.  My cook is renowned through Calcutta for his skill.  He brought me attestations of a long succession of gourmands, and among them one from Lord Dalhousie, who pronounced him decidedly the first artist in Bengal. [Lord Dalhousie, the father of the Governor-General, was Commander-In-Chief in India during the years 1830 and 1831.] This great man, and his two assistants, I am to have for thirty rupees a month.  While I am on the subject of the cuisine, I may as well say all that I have to say about it at once.  The tropical fruits are wretched.  The best of them is inferior to our apricot or gooseberry.  When I was a child, I had a notion of its being the most exquisite of treats to eat plantains and yams, and to drink palm-wine.  How I envied my father for having enjoyed these luxuries!  I have now enjoyed them all, and I have found like much greater men on much more important occasions, that all is vanity.  A plantain is very like a rotten pear,—­so like that I would lay twenty to one that a person blindfolded would not discover the difference.  A yam is better.  It is like an indifferent potato.  I tried palm-wine at a pretty village near Madras, where I slept one night.  I told Captain Barron that I had been curious to taste that liquor ever since I first saw, eight or nine and twenty years ago, the picture of the negro climbing the tree in Sierra Leone.  The next morning I was roused by a servant, with a large bowl of juice fresh from the tree.  I drank it, and found it very like ginger-beer in which the ginger has been sparingly used.”

Macaulay necessarily spent away from home the days on which the Supreme Council, or the Law Commission, held their meetings; but the rest of his work, legal, literary, and educational, he carried on in the quiet of his library.  Now and again, a morning was consumed in returning calls, an expenditure of time which it is needless to say that he sorely grudged.  “Happily, the good people here are too busy to be at home.  Except the parsons, they are all