quantities of fish.  The Viceroy, an intrepid pioneer in gastronomic matters, had a great cattla boiled for his dinner.  The first mouthful defeated him; he declared that the consistency of the fish was that of an old flannel shirt, and the taste a compound of mud and of the smell of a covered racquet-court.  A lady insisted on presenting the midshipmen with two dozen bottles of a very good champagne for the Gun-room Mess.  In the innocence of her heart she thought that the champagne would last them for a year, but on New Year’s Eve the little lambs had a great celebration on board, and drank the whole two dozen at one sitting.  As there were exactly eighteen of them, this made a fair allowance apiece; they all got exceedingly drunk, and the Admiral stopped their leave for two months, so we saw no more of them.  They were quite good boys really though, like all their kind, rather over-full of high spirits.

As is well known, Queen Victoria celebrated her seventieth birthday by commencing the study of Hindustani under the tuition of a skilled Moonshee.  At the farewell audience the Queen gave my sister, Her Majesty, on learning that Lady Lansdowne intended to begin learning Hindustani as soon as she reached India, proposed that they should correspond occasionally in Urdu, to test the relative progress they were making.  Every six months or so a letter from the Queen, beautifully written in Persian characters, reached Calcutta, to which my sister duly replied.  In strict confidence, I may say that I strongly suspect that Lady Lansdowne’s letters were written by her Moonshee, and that she merely copied the Persian characters, which she could do very neatly.  The Arabic alphabet is used in writing Persian, with three or four extra letters added to express sounds which do not exist in Arabic; it is, of course, written from right to left.  I had an hour and a half’s daily lesson in Urdu from an efficient, if immensely pompous, Moonshee, but I never attempted to learn to read or write the Persian characters.

I do not think that any one who has not traversed the plains of Northern Indian can have any idea of their deadly monotony.  Hour after hour of level, sun-baked wheat-fields, interspersed with arid tracts of desert, hardly conforms to the traditional idea of Indian scenery, nor when once Bengal is left behind is there any of that luxuriant vegetation which one instinctively associates with hot countries.  In bars in the United States, any one wishing for whisky and water was (I advisedly use the past tense) accustomed to drain a small tumbler of neat whisky, and then to swallow a glass of water.  In India everything is arranged on this principle; the whisky and the water are kept quite separate.  The dead-flat expanse of the Northern plains is unbroken by the most insignificant of mounds; on the other hand, in the hills it is almost impossible to find ten yards of level ground.  In the same way during the dry season you know with absolute certainty that there will be no rain; whilst during the rains you can predict, without the faintest shadow of doubt, that the downpour will continue day by day.  Personally, I prefer whisky and water mixed.