in Fort William. [Sidenote: 8. The Howrah Bridge, Calcutta.] [Sidenote: 9. Scene from the Howrah Bridge.] Nothing impresses the stranger in Calcutta more than the density of life in this populous city, the focus of a great and fertile province. At no spot is it more evident than on the Howrah Bridge, where from morning to night a close throng crosses and re-crosses. From the approach to the bridge we look down on a crowd bathing in the muddy but sacred water. Cheek by jowl with the busy commercial traffic of the bridge, we have here the religion of the East. Purified by the bath, and clothed again, the bather sits in the crowd while for a few pies, or say a farthing, his sect mark is painted afresh on his forehead. [Sidenote: 10. Calcutta from Howrah across the Hooghly.] The buildings of Calcutta are worthy of the capital rank of the city, but they are of European design, for Calcutta is a modern city. Fort William was so named from King William III., in whose reign, little more than two centuries ago, Job Charnock, a factor or commercial representative of the East India Company, bought the little village Kalikata, probably so named from a local shrine of the goddess Kali. There he built, on the site of the present Customs House, the first Fort William. Within ten years the population had grown to some ten thousand, and it has never ceased growing to this day, although at one time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an episode in the history of the place which for a time somewhat checked its advance. Suraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, quarrelled with the English at Fort William, and finally attacked them. Most of them escaped down the river, but a hundred and forty-six were taken prisoners when Fort William fell, and were confined for a night in a small cell measuring 22 feet by 14 feet, and some 18 feet high. It was at the end of the hot season, and only twenty-three of the prisoners came out alive the next morning. This tragedy is known in history as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Soon afterwards Colonel Clive, the same Clive who as a Captain defended Arcot in the south of India, arrived with reinforcements and recaptured Calcutta. Fort William was rebuilt on a larger scale, and in a position a little south of the original site. Suraj-ud-Daulah quarrelled with the East India Company again, and Clive led an army against him into the north of Bengal, and defeated him and his French allies in the famous battle of Plassey. The British force amounted to only three thousand men, of whom but two hundred were English, whereas the Nawab had an army of nearly forty thousand. In 1765 the whole of Bengal was annexed by the East India Company, and from 1772 was ruled from Calcutta. Suraj-ud-Daulah’s capital had been at a place called Murshidabad, a hundred miles to the north of Calcutta.