CHAPTER XI.

THE EVENING DRIVE.

THE display of carriages and saddle-horses which nightly traverse the Strand and the Course in Calcutta in fine weather, would surprise even the cockney fresh from the glories of Hyde Park and Rotten Row. The expense of keeping a vehicle in Calcutta being comparatively insignificant, every family, in even middling circumstances, has its carriage, with either one or two horses, the proportion of really elegant vehicles being greater than elsewhere. In too many cases, I believe, the anxiety to make a proper display upon the Strand is carried to a ridiculous extent. Parsimony is equally practised at home, for instance, by Mr. and Mrs. Smudge, who came

out lately from England, and by Mr. and Mrs. De Souza, whose swarthy little ones proclaim their country, to enable them to drive their elegant barouches with a coachman and two livery servants behind.

To this foolish display the small cost of keeping servants tends to lead many who would otherwise avoid it. For each horse a syce or groom is employed, at the rate of eight or ten shillings a month, wages on which he feeds himself and his family, smokes constantly, and is all day lounging about his master's stables, if not actually employed in working. A few more shillings provides for him a neat white or red cotton dress, with a sash and turban displaying the colours of his master's livery; and it is really astonishing to see how much show can thus be made at a very trifling outlay. Hence it is, that behind Mr. and Mrs. Smudge's, and Mr. and Mrs. De Souza's barouches, we see two idle loons with blackish brown faces, arrayed in clean apparel, and displaying the red and yellow of their liveries to the best advantage; hence the uniformity apparent between the coachman on the box and the servants behind, which gives

a stranger the idea of a really well appointed and elegant establishment.

But the horses ?-ah, we must not be too critical upon the horses in these cases. The barouche glitters, it is true, in all the glory of newly-applied varnish, laid on, indeed, by Messrs. Smudge and De Souza themselves, or by their servants under their special supervision and direction; but, on the horses, we really must not be too critical. The chestnut one on the off-side, which conveys Mr. Smudge or Mr. De Souza to office every morning, is rather thin, it is true, and does not look particularly likely to run away either now or at any future time; his companion, a black-amoor, with a shaggy coat, is a vicious specimen of horse-flesh, that obstinately refuses to go in single harness, and can only be coaxed along by having the chestnut Rozinante to play with and attempt to bite as he proceeds, the said unfortunate Rozinante pulling him and the barouche, and the five Smudges or six De Souzas with three servants along-no wonder he is not fat.

Did you but see the knowing cuts that ferocious-looking coachman, with his wiry mous

tache, gives the pair as he gets to the end of the drive and is about turning-did you but see how he takes care to avoid thrashing them when really good equipages are in the neighbourhood, and how brawly he lays it on when they have passed-upon the black-a-moor for impeding the chestnut-upon the chestnut for not drawing on the black-a-moor faster-you would say the man had a discretion and a carefulness of his master's reputation which were highly commendable.

The horsemen and horsewomen, too, present contrasts as striking as the carriages. The noblest Arabs and the swiftest Australians may-or rather, might then-be seen bestrode and managed by some of the best horsemen in the world; I say "might then," for in the altered condition of affairs, it will probably be some time before Australian horses are again brought to the Calcutta market. Accustomed continually to horse exercise, sometimes of the most violent and dangerous description, as in pig-sticking, the Anglo-Indian is probably one of the best horsemen in the world-the true Anglo-Indian-he who has spent fifteen or twenty years in the country, and who, instead

of sinking down into a debauchery that unfits him for all manly exercise, or gross gluttony, has retained some of his English energy amidst the suffocating heats of the tropics.

Not by any means that all the horsemen whom one sees on the Calcutta Course or Strand are of this character, far from it. Mr. Grildam, for instance, who has lately arrived to be an assistant (there are no 'clerks" in the mercantile houses in Calcutta) in the house of Mota, Soostey, and Co., and who regularly takes his vespernal ride upon the Strand, has not yet arrived at such perfection in horsemanship as to feel at all easy or secure in his new seat, notwithstanding the experience of horseflesh he acquired in the Battersea Fields on Sundays. He is tortured by those unsteady ears of the animal, which no soothing on his part can keep quiet; he watches them with all the diligence of an aural anatomical student as they now bend forwards, and Grildam prepares for an agonizing shy by grasping the mane with his fingers and the saddle with his knees, smiling the while, or attempting to smile.

Cruel horse-it was a false alarm, and the