its adjacent quarters, is to New Orleans; only it is--one may say
_Hibernice_--a great deal more so. It is on the inner or harbor side
of the island of Bombay. Instead of the low-banked Mississippi, the
waters of a tranquil and charming haven smile welcome out yonder from
between wooded island-peaks. Here Bombay has its counting-houses, its
warehouses, its exchange, its "Cotton Green," its docks. But not its
dwellings. This part of the Fort where we have met is, one may say,
only inhabited for six hours in the day--from ten in the morning until
four in the afternoon. At the former hour Bombay is to be found
here engaged at trade: at the latter it rushes back into the various
quarters outside the Fort which go to make up this many-citied city.
So that at this particular hour of eight in the morning one must
expect to find little here that is alive, except either a philosopher,
a stranger, a policeman or a rat.

"Well, then," I said as Bhima Gandharva finished communicating this
information to me, "we are all here."

"How?"

"There stand you, a philosopher; here I, a stranger; yonder, the
policeman; and, heavens and earth! what a rat!" I accompanied this
exclamation by shooing a big musky fellow from behind a bale of cotton
whither I had just seen him run.

Bhima Gandharva smiled in a large, tranquil way he has, which is like
an Indian plain full of ripe corn. "I find it curious," he said, "to
compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade
about this place with that which one would see if one were far up
yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains,