The general appearance of an oriental town is always more or less ruinous; and here the eye is fatigued with bricks and crumbling edifices, and the ear with prayer-bells. The bright meadows and green trees which adorn the European Resident’s dwelling, some four miles back from the river, alone relieve the monotony of the scene. The streets are so narrow that it is difficult to ride a horse through them; and the houses are often six stories high, with galleries crossing above from house to house. These tall, gaunt edifices sometimes give place to clumps of cottages, and a mass of dusty ruins, the unsavoury retreats of vermin and filth, where the _Calotropis arborea_ generally spreads its white branches and glaucous leaves—a dusty plant. Here, too, enormous spiders’ webs hang from the crumbling walls, choked also with dust, and resembling curtains of coarse muslin, being often some yards across, and not arranged in radii and arcs, but spun like weaver’s woofs. Paintings, remarkable only for their hideous proportions and want of perspective, are daubed in vermilion, ochre, and indigo. The elephant, camel, and porpoise of the Ganges, dog, shepherd, peacock, and horse, are especially frequent, and so is a running pattern of a hand spread open, with a blood-red spot on the palm. A still less elegant but frequent object is the fuel, which is composed of the manure collected on the roads of the city, moulded into flat cakes, and stuck by the women on the walls to dry, retaining the sign-manual of the artist in the impressed form of her outspread hand. The cognizance of the Rajah, two fish chained together, appears over the gates of public buildings. The hundreds of temples and shrines throughout the city are its most remarkable feature: sacred bulls, and lingams of all sizes, strewed with flowers and grains of rice meet the eye at every turn; and the city’s boast is the possession of one million idols, which, of one kind and another, I can well believe. The great Hindoo festival of the _Holi_ was now celebrating, and the city more than ordinarily crowded; throwing red powder (lac and flour), with rose-water, is the great diversion at a festival more childish by far than a carnival.