“MY DEAR ——: I hope you have received a note informing you of my coming on here from Madras. I will now endeavor to follow my own footsteps over again on paper. On the Tuesday morning I landed at Madras. It is a large city, built right on the sea-beach, facing the rolling surf; it seems a mystery that anybody should ever have thought of founding a city on such a site, but in the days when the old East India Company was merely a mercantile, cotton buying and speculating firm, before it thought, by mixing itself in native broils, to increase its power, this was done, as much, no doubt as anything for the purpose of opposing some of the aggressions which the French at Pondicherry, some sixty miles to the south, were then making, for the French taught us the plan of ‘protecting’ the natives. It was entirely in this Presidency that Lord Clive, from being a mere clerk, achieved his early renown, and managed before he was twenty-seven to retire on £40,000 a year. “Well, the town and suburbs extend some four or five miles along the beach. Talk about hardening the D’Urban streets, but to harden these must have cost a mint of money. They are all around for miles as level as a billiard table, or if you would prefer the simile, as flat as a grave-stone—the game, you know, gets finished at both places! The merchants’ offices, post-office, telegraph office, Supreme Court, are all near the pier, and to the rear and southward of these is the native town. These public buildings are all fine ones, though the dust and glare give the outside of them a parched appearance; inside, however, they are got up ‘regardless of expense.’ Comfort must be thought of in this climate. Further still to the south, say a mile, is Fort St. George. This is the first fort I have been in, and it seemed to my inexperienced eye to be impregnable, bastion on bastion, fosse on fosse. The fort is lit with gas, and inside, which comprises, I should imagine, some thousands of acres, there are the government buildings, mint, soldiers’ quarters and arsenal. Here during the mutiny came all the white people and the Eurasians, as they call half-castes. There is also an American Ice Co., with a magnificent ice-house some 200 feet high.