There was an amazing demand for these drinks; and, without wishing to enlarge on their merits or the reverse, I must say they were honest drinks, compounded of the best materials, and very unlike those that I have tasted under similar names at certain of our Exhibitions. The most appalling thing about the Calcutta of those days was the nauseating effluvium that arose from all parts of it; this was a smell _sui generis_, noticeable indeed in and around “Chowringhee,” the European quarter; still more so in the neighbourhood of the best shops; and reaching its climax in the China Bazaar, a den of the most arrant thieves to be met with in any country. I imagine that it was a peculiar distillation of sewage, brought about by the action of a hot sun; and I remarked its peculiar intensity at daybreak, and just after nightfall. On one occasion, I mistook the hour for a funeral, and arrived a great deal too soon at the rendezvous, which was close to that exceedingly filthy river the Hooghly; I was, I remember, well-nigh poisoned—a dissecting-room could hardly come up to it. I had almost said that, on the part of the residents, familiarity with the odour had bred contempt; but that would be falling short of the mark, inasmuch as I believe they had positively learned to like it. The mention of smells associated with sewers brings to my mind the “bandicoot” rat, one of which, to my considerable discomfiture, I saw making its way across my friend’s “compound.” It appeared to me quite as large as a leveret, and considerably more formidable, nor was I greatly reassured by the information, “Oh! that’s _only_ a bandicoot; plenty of them about.” The term “bandicoot” is a corruption of the native name _pandikoku_, which signifies pig-rat. It is a clean feeder living on grain and roots, and is said to be as delicate eating as the porcupine. The internecine “war of the rats,” waged in our country between the black and the brown, terminated in favour of the former, those useful scavengers that, for the most part, live in our sewers; but in the East—from which they were, like most other nasty things, originally imported—they swarm everywhere, and are most destructive. For the sake of the grain, which my sheep would turn out of their troughs, each in his eagerness to obtain the lion’s share, they positively honeycombed my field. Having in vain tried extermination by means of drowning and smoking, I bethought me as a last resource of phosphorescent paste, and by spreading it on pieces of native bread and placing it near their holes, I killed heaps of them, which were buried under my vine with good effect.