ship is the most beautiful object man has ever devised, and when the dusk was falling, with every spar and rope outlined in black against the vivid crimson of the short-lived Indian sunset, the long line of shipping made a glorious picture.  Nineteen years later every sailing-ship had disappeared from the Hooghly, and in their place were rows of unsightly, rusty-sided iron tanks, with squat polemasts and ugly funnels vomiting black smoke.  A tramp-steamer has its uses, no doubt, but it is hardly a thing of beauty.  Ichabod!  Ichabod!

Calcutta is fortunate in having so fine a lung as the great stretch of the Maidan.  It has been admirably planted and laid out, with every palm of tree of aggressively Indian appearance carefully excluded from its green expanse, so it wears a curiously home-like appearance.  The Maidan is very reminiscent of Hyde Park, though almost double its size.  There is one spot, where the Gothic spire of the cathedral emerges from a mass of greenery, with a large sheet of water in the foreground, which recalls exactly the view over Bayswater from the bridge spanning the Serpentine.

Considering that Calcutta Cathedral was built in 1840; that it was designed by an Engineer officer, and not by an architect; that its “Gothic” is composed of cast-iron and stucco instead of stone, it is really not such a bad building.  The great size of its interior gives it a certain dignity, and owing to the generosity of the European community, it is most lavishly adorned with marbles, mosaics, and stained glass.  It possesses the finest organ in Asia, and a really excellent choir, the men Europeans, the boys being Eurasians.  These small half-castes have very sweet voices, with a curious and not unpleasing metallic timbre about them.  At evening service in the cathedral, should one ignore such details as the rows of electric punkahs, the temperature, and the dingy complexions of the choir-boys, it was almost impossible to realise that one was not in England.  I had been used to singing in a church choir, and it was pleasant to hear such familiar cathedral services as Garrett in D, Smart in F, Walmisley in D minor, and Hopkins in F, so perfectly rendered seven thousand miles away from home, thanks to that excellent musician, Dr. Slater, the cathedral organist.

St. Andrew’s Scottish Presbyterian Church stands in its own wooded grounds in which there are two large ponds, or, as Anglo-Indians would put it, it stands in a compound with large tanks.  The church is consequently infested with mosquitoes.  The last time that I was in Calcutta, the Gordon Highlanders had just relieved an English regiment in the fort, and on the first Sunday after their arrival, four hundred Gordons were marched to a parade service at St. Andrew’s.  The most optimistic mosquito had never in his wildest dreams imagined such a succulent banquet as that afforded by four hundred bare-kneed, kilted Highlanders, and the mosquitoes made the fullest