wall of water, which at Diamond Harbour rose to the height of 34 feet;
when it reached Calcutta it was 27 to 28 feet, rushing up the Hooghly
from the sea at the rate of 20 miles an hour, destroying and
overwhelming everything it encountered in its wild and devastating
career. It was, of course, a matter of extreme difficulty to arrive at
any very reliable estimate of the number who perished, owing to the
vast area of country over which the storm raged. Happily the death
rate in Calcutta itself was, comparatively speaking, not so very
great, and was confined more or less to the crews of small native
craft plying on the river, such as lighters, cargo-boats, dinghees,
budgetows, and green-boats. This closes a brief chapter of some of
the incidents that occurred and which have flitted across my memory
in this never-to-be-forgotten storm which nearly overwhelmed Calcutta
in October 1864, and shook it literally to its very foundations; but
no pen can adequately visualise the picture of awful desolation and
ruin that it wrought and left behind in its terribly devastating
course.

_[The pictures illustrating this chapter are from a collection in the
possession of Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co_.]


THE CYCLONE OF 1867.

This happened about a month later than that of 1864, on the 1st
November, 1867, and long past the usual period for storms of this
violent nature. On this occasion I was occupying the top flat of what
was then 12, Hastings Street, Colvin Ghât, next door to the offices of
Grindlay & Co., and on the site of the building recently erected by
Cox & Co. as a storing warehouse. It was a very old shaky kind of