the complexion and dress of its oriental population and the
architectural compromises imposed on European buildings by a tropical
climate. The Marquess of Wellesley built Government House over a hundred
years ago on the model of Kedleston, and it is still the stateliest
official residence in British India. Fort William with Olive's ramparts
and fosses is still almost untouched, and with an ever-expanding
Walhalla of bronze or marble Governors and Viceroys and
Commanders-in-Chief, and at the farther end the white marble walls and
domes of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hall--the one noble monument we
have built in India--at last nearing completion, the broad expanse of
Calcutta's incomparable Maidan is, even more than our London parks, the
green playfield and the vital lung of the whole city. Along and behind
Chowringhee there are still a few of the old-time mansions of
Thackeray's "nabobs," with their deep, pillared verandahs standing well
off from the road, each within its discreet "compound," but they are all
rapidly making room for "eligible residences," more opulent perhaps but
more closely packed, or for huge blocks of residential flats, even less
adapted to the climate. The great business quarter round Dalhousie
Square has been steadily rebuilt on a scale of massive magnificence
scarcely surpassed in the city of London, and many of the shops compare
with those of our West End. The river, too, all along the Garden Reach
and far below is often almost as crowded as the Pool of London, with
ocean-going steamers waiting to load or unload their cargoes as well as
with lumbering native sailing ships and the ferries that ply ceaselessly
between the different quarters of the city on both banks of the Hugli.
The continuous roar of traffic in the busy streets, the crowded
tram-cars, the motors and taxis jostling the ancient bullock-carts, the
surging crowds in the semi-Europeanised native quarters, even the pall
of smoke that tells of many modern industrial activities are not quite
so characteristic of new India as, when I was last there, the