The wives and families of India's viceroys have found a broad field for the exercise of their benevolent tendencies, and not a few have left here noble monuments to the memory of their days in the great black empire. Eden Gardens is one, the beautiful public park adjoining the grounds of the viceregal residence and the gift of Lord Auckland's sisters to the city of Calcutta. The Dufferin Medical Mission is another, inaugurated by Lady Dufferin during the governor-generalship of her husband as a means of providing medical help for the women of India. A few weeks after her arrival in the empire Lady Curzon presided at a meeting of the central committee of the Dufferin fund, and manifested a keen interest in the noble charity. It has within the last thirty years become customary for the entire English government in India to spend the six hot months of the year in Simla, the town in the Himalayan hills whose singular natural and social topography have become familiar in late years to many English readers through Kipling's Indian tales. The Foreign Office at London recently expended a large sum of money in the erection of suitable buildings there, including a new viceregal residence that is a vast improvement over its predecessor, which was little more than a cottage. It was perched on a precipitous crag, and Lady Dufferin used to compare it to the ark balanced on Mount Ararat, adding that in the rainy season she herself felt like Mrs. Noah. The villa at Simla and the palaces at Calcutta and at Barrackpore on the river near the capital constitute the trio of viceregal residences in which the Curzons are passing the five years of their life in India. None of them is a home in the meaning we give that word,--a place of privacy and relaxation,--for each has its own degree of state and formality. They live to-day in the glare of the world, with no more seclusion than ever falls either to "the head that wears a crown" or to those to whom it delegates its power. The state that encompasses them does not conceal the personality of either, and both are full of interest. Marrying a man whose life promised so much, Mary Leiter has undoubtedly been a factor in the early culmination of that promise. She is spoken of throughout India with love and pride, and when Lord Curzon's day comes to pass the government into other hands, it may be that the empire will be placarded with signs, as it was, says a recent historian, when Lord Ripon retired, bearing a legend similar to that they bore then: "We want more Curzons!" NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE