pretty things as in London, only, of course, they are of necessity
more expensive; it costs a lot to bring them out. The Clubs are in
this street, the Bengal Club, and the United Service where my brother
would even now be leading a comfortable bachelor existence if he
hadn't had a bothering sister to provide a habitation for.

Chowringhee faces the Maidan, a very large park containing among other
things a race-course, and cricket and football grounds. The word
Maidan is Arabic and Persian and Hindustani for an open space, and I
hope you like the superior way I explain things to you. You, who
can be silent in so many languages, will probably know what Maidan
means--but no matter.

This, then, is the European Calcutta, clean and spacious and pleasant,
but not nearly so interesting as the native part. Turn down a side
street, walk a little way and you are in a nest of mean streets,
unpaved, dirty, smelling vilely, lined with open booths, where squat
half-naked men selling lumps of sticky sweetmeats and piles of things
that look like unbaked scones and other strange eatables; and little
naked babies tumble in the dust with goats and puppies. It seems to
me that I go about asking "Why?" all day and no one gives me a
satisfactory answer to anything. Why, for example, should we require a
troop of servants living, as we do, in a kind of hotel? And yet there
they are--Boggley's bearer and my _ayah_--I can see some reason for
their presence--a _kitmutgar_ to wait on us at table and bring tea in
the afternoon, another young assistant _kitmutgar_ who scurries like a
frightened rabbit at my approach, a delightful small boy who rejoices
in the name of _pani-wallah_, whose sole duty is to carry water for
the baths, the _dhobi_ who washes our clothes by beating them between
two large--and I should say, judging by the state of the clothes,