I have been round several evenings after school hours and chatted with Chundi Churn and his brother and various friends that dropped in--an intelligent little community. Two of them are Brahman fellows of about thirty, with the eager tense look that the Brahmans mostly have, but good imaginative faces. We discuss the Indian Congress, English and Indian customs, the child-marriage question (which is raging just now), and the great question of Caste. They insist on my eating various sweet cakes of native preparation, but will not eat with me; and they smoke hubble-bubble pipes, which they pass round--but the Brahmans must have a hubble-bubble to themselves! At the same time they are careful to explain that “no one believes in all this now”; but as they are at home, and only trellis-work between us and the lane, it would not do to violate the rules. And this, I believe, is largely the state of affairs. The anglicising population, for the sake of parents’ feelings (and they are tender on this point), or respectability, or commercial connection, keep up a show of caste rules which they have ceased or are ceasing to believe in; and it is an open secret that Brahman gentlemen of high standing in their caste, not unfrequently when traveling, or in places where they are not known, resort to British hotels and have a high feed of beefsteaks and champagne! One of the Brahmans is clerk in a mercantile establishment in the English part of Calcutta, and some of the others are students at the Metropolitan College. Western education is going on at a tremendous rate--so much so that there will soon be an educated proletariat (what Grant Duff calls “the worst of evils”) in the great cities of India. Two or three of the party are very quick at mathematics--which seems to be a subject in which the Bengalis excel--and readily picked up the key to one or two little problems which I presented to them. They all seem to be much impressed with the greatness of Western civilisation--for the present at any rate, but will react probably before so very long. Finding I knew something of astronomy they pelted me with questions about the stars, and insisted on going out at night and trying to hunt up the ecliptic among the constellations! Then after a time they would relapse into tale-telling and music. The fellows still show a truly Oriental love of long stories, and would listen with rapt attention to one of their party relating some ancient yarn about the child of a king who was exposed in the woods and ultimately came back after many convolutions of adventure and claimed his kingdom--just as if they had not heard it before; or about the chaste Draupatha (in the Mahabhárata) who--when Duriyodhana, desiring to insult her before a large assembly, gave orders that she should be stripped of her cloth--thought of Vishnu, and her cloth went on lengthening and unwinding indefinitely--their stories lengthening and unwinding like