expand like the ample vests of trustees and directors after dinner.
The city extends some four and a half miles along the left bank of the
Hooghly, and its breadth between the "Circular Road" and the river
is about a mile and a half. If one cuts off from this space that part
which lies south of a line drawn eastward from the Beebee Ross Ghât
to the Upper Circular Road--the northern portion thus segregated being
the native town--one has a veritable city of palaces; and when
to these one adds the magnificent suburbs lying beyond the old
circumvallation of the "Mahratta Ditch"--Chitpore, Nundenbagh,
Bobar, Simla, Sealdah, Entally, Ballygunge, Bhovaneepore, Allypore,
Kidderpore--together with the riverward-sloping lawns and stately
mansions of "Garden Reach" on the sea-side of town, and the great
dockyards and warehouses of the right bank of the river opposite the
city, one has enclosed a space which may probably vie with any similar
one in the world for the appearances and the realities of wealth
within it.

But if one should allow this first impression of Calcutta--an
impression in which good eating and the general pampering of the flesh
seem to be the most prominent features--to lead one into the belief
that here is nothing but money-making and grossness, one would commit
a serious mistake. It is among the rich babous, or commercial natives,
of Calcutta that the remarkable reformatory movement known as "Young
India" has had its origin, and it would really seem that the very same
qualities of patience, of prudence, of foresight and of good sense
which have helped these babous to accumulate their wealth are now
about being applied to the nobler and far more difficult work of
lifting their countrymen out of the degradations of old outworn
customs and faiths upon some higher plane of reasonable behavior.