directly in front of us, and range after range stretches away in the distance.

Mt. Everest, the highest of the Himalayan peaks, is not visible from Darjeeling, and in order to see it we had to make an excursion of six miles to Tiger Hill, at an elevation of nine thousand feet. We started before daylight, in order to be at the summit in time to catch the early effects of the rising sun upon the mountain peaks. It was a weird ride on our ponies along up the sharp ridges in the gray dawn, with the black chasms below us, and, as we reached the top of the hill, to see the first rays of light tipping the great crests from an invisible source far below us. I cannot attempt to describe our sensations as the sun came slowly up, nor picture to you the changing hues of the scene.

Our little knoll formed an isolated point of view, with the foothills of six or seven thousand feet lying below us, while the great snowy barrier of the Himalayas rose immediately above us and stretched away to the east and west for two hundred miles, with hardly a depression below twenty thousand feet. Several of the mountains exceed twenty-five thousand feet in height, and Mt. Everest, one hundred and twenty miles away, rises to the almost incredible altitude of 29,002 feet. Such grandeur of scenery is nowhere else to be seen. Zermatt and Chamouny appear tame beside it. The Matterhorn piled upon the Jungfrau would not reach the top of Mt. Everest, and the whole of the Bernese Oberland range might be hidden in a single one of these valleys.

We should be glad to linger in this wonderful spot, but we must hasten on our tour, and besides we have engagements waiting us at Calcutta. The Viceroy is giving your father a dinner on Thursday, and we have many things to do and see there...

On our return from Darjeeling we spent five days in Calcutta, during which time we enjoyed the hospitality of Lord

Elgin, the Governor-General, of Mr. Polk, the Consul-General of the United States, of a number of English families, and especially of several educated and refined Hindus. I had a letter of introduction to a leading Hindu lawyer, who, with his wife, was educated in England, and he pursued his legal studies at the Inner Temple. Both of them spoke English perfectly, and were very accomplished and intelligent persons. They had broken "caste" and were prominent members of the Bramo Somaj, or reformed Hindu cult. Nevertheless through them we were introduced into the native society, and saw much of its interior life to which we could not otherwise have secured access.

Our trip through India afforded me an opportunity to study the people and government, somewhat hastily it is true, but sufficiently to form some opinion respecting them. Every one who passes through the country with an observant mind must be struck with the grandeur and beneficence of the British acquisition of that territory. It surpasses the Roman Empire in the era of its greatest glory and extension. It contains a population equal to all Europe and a territory of continental proportions, crowded with varied races possessed of an ancient civilization, literature, philosophy, and arts.

The beneficence of the British acquisition is most conspicuous in the unity and peace, which, for the first time in its history, the country enjoys. Until the British conquest, India was never under the sway of one government, not even in the height of the Mogul supremacy; nor did it ever before experience the blessings of peace in all its borders. Its normal condition was that of war among contending rulers, and disorder and anarchy were the rule rather than the exception. It contains many races, speaking nearly one hundred different languages and dialects, with two prominent religions, the Hindu and the Mohammedan, the adherents of which cherish for each other an intense hatred. These conditions

explain the comparative ease with which British rule is enforced.

This reign of peace has multiplied the population to the enormous extent of one hundred million of souls within a century, making an aggregate of three hundred millions in the country.

The area of land under cultivation has largely increased all over the country, in some instances as much as seventy per cent, while its value has everywhere greatly advanced. Before the British occupation there was scarcely a single road deserving the name. Now they traverse every district, railroads connect all important towns, and twenty-eight thousand miles of irrigating canals under government supervision constitute a system surpassing any other in the world. Competent authority states that the rate of taxation is the lightest of any civilized government, and that under British rule it has steadily diminished. Education, before almost unknown, is being generally introduced. The civil service, as I have already pointed out, is equal to that of any nation.

The British Government of India is not a perfect one, but its influence upon the people is beneficent and elevating. How long it is to continue I do not venture to predict, but during my visit I saw little evidence of internal danger to British supremacy. The Hindu friends whom I met at Calcutta and elsewhere spoke to me of the influence of the principles of our Declaration of Independence upon the enlightened classes, and the Indian Congress, a voluntary gathering, was holding its sessions annually with freedom from governmental restraint. This spirit has apparently increased in later years, and threatens to become formidable. In certain quarters in Great Britain the question is sometimes mooted whether its possession of India is a burden or a blessing to the United Kingdom, but I think there is no considerable body of the English nation who contemplate its relinquishment, and no

Ministry could maintain itself which was proved guilty of culpable neglect in measures for its defense.

The bugbear of Russian invasion was very prominent when I was on my journey. I did not converse with a single Englishman on the subject who was not thoroughly convinced that Russia's great aim was to drive the British out of India, and that France stood ready to second her efforts. But subsequent events have put an end to those fears, for the present at least. These are the rise of Japan as a military power, the defeat of Russia by that power, the establishment of cordial relations between France and Great Britain, the understanding between the latter and Russia as to Persia and Afghanistan, and especially the defensive and offensive alliance of Great Britain and Japan.

CHAPTER XXX

VISIT TO CHINA AND JAPAN

LEAVING Calcutta, we next touched at Rangoon, and spent five days in Mandalay, the old capital of Burma. Here we had full opportunity to see the practice of the Buddhist religion. The most striking feature of the country was the freedom and intelligence of the women. We stopped two days at Penang, and devoted a week to Singapore, where we found much to interest us the evidences of British commercial enterprise, its foresight in seizing upon important places like this port and Hong Kong, and a study of the Malay States. The Sultan of Johore has a palace in this city, in which he entertained us at dinner with a display of Oriental brilliancy; and he invited us to his dominions across the strait near by on the continent; the Governor, Sir Charles Mitchell, made our stay both pleasant and profitable by his many attentions; and we met here and were entertained by Admiral Freemantle of the British Navy on his flagship, and by the Lancaster of our own navy, returning from the China station.

The vessel on which we sailed from Singapore touched at Saigon, the French capital of Cochin China, where we passed two days. Here we met in the natives quite a different people from those of the other countries visited, but the town itself was but a reproduction of Paris on a very small scale.

At Hong Kong, the chief commercial emporium of Asia and at that time the third port in importance in the world, we saw the same evidences of British enterprise and supremacy in the Far East which we noted at Singapore; and the British authorities vied with our own Consul-General in affording us every possible opportunity to see and study its commercial and social features,