Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/70

 are mere wigwams of reeds and thatch, shrouded in bamboo foliage, and loaded with immense water melons. The people are almost naked,or clothed in muslin robes, with silver rings on their wrists and ancles, their fingers and their toes,and golden ornaments in their ears and noses, and their caste and rank painted or enamelled on their foreheads, like escutcheons over a gateway. The stranger is agreeably surprised to find them so fair, and even so handsome, with more regular and finer turned features than those of his own countrymen; graceful in their gait, easy and polite in their manners, and in their intercourse with one another highly polished and civilized; speaking in an unknown language yet making themselves understood; kneeling in prayer along the highways, regardless of turmoil around them, or pouring out libations into the sacred stream. Garden Reach, with its suburban villas, now heaves in view, and the ship soon anchors off Fort William, with Calcutta and its palaces all before him.

2. LANDING AT CALCUTTA.—The stranger now lands houseless, homeless, friendless, companionless, and partly helpless, a stranger for the first time on the shores of a foreign land. The strand is crowded in the extreme with natives bathing, the coolies pounce upon his baggage like robbers, yet with no intention of stealing it; the palanquin-bearers rush into the water,