Late in the same evening the pilot-boat came out to meet us, and not long after we cast anchor at a place called Saugor, where there is a lighthouse. I remember distinctly the oppressive night we passed here, owing no doubt to the combined impurities rising out of the turbid waves and the fetid odors of the adjoining land. Early next morning we were again in motion, sailing up the dusky Hoogley. Its low, muddy banks were dotted with wretched-looking mud huts, relieved only by the ever-graceful palm trees that waved above them. What a contrast this river was to the clear, limpid, and joyous Krishna, the high-banked and proudly isolated Godaveri, the genial, broad-breasted Taptee, and the grand, impetuous Vishwamitra of Western India! Another day was nearly gone before we reached our moorings. We cast anchor once more amid a dense forest of masts, funnels, and native craft in the harbor of Calcutta. We were met at the Champhool Ghaut, or landing-place, by kind friends. Ascending a magnificent flight of stone steps and passing under a great archway, we hurried into a European carriage, and were driven rapidly from the strange conflicting mass of humanity that always abounds at a great seaport, but especially at the seaports of all the British settlements in India. The house of our friends here was in many respects furnished like a European dwelling, and one might almost fancy himself in an English home but for the pillared halls; the spacious chambers, with long punkahs or fans suspended from the ceilings, some of which are kept going night and day; the dark, silent barefooted domestics, robed in pure white, who are seen gliding noiselessly to and fro, which lend a powerful magic charm, a flavor of the Arabian Nights, to the interior of even the most ordinary of British homes in the East. Calcutta, the capital of British India, still bears the name of the black goddess Kali, who is supposed to spread pestilence, famine, and death over the land of which she is the presiding deity whenever her altars are neglected and her thirst for vengeance unappeased. Unhealthy as the spot is, it was rendered infinitely more so by the innumerable corpses that were until within a few years cast upon the waters of the Hoogley: the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the land, unable to pay the expenses of a funeral by cremation, committed their dead to these waters in the belief that its mystic current would purify them from all taint of sin. This, however, has been prohibited by the British authorities. Huge cremation-towers now receive all bodies cast upon its waters, whence the never-dying flames are seen constantly ascending, dark and lurid, toward the tranquil blue sky.