There was a third mode of proceeding to the north-west. A few years previously a River Steam Company had been formed for the transmission of passengers and goods. Passengers were accommodated in flats drawn by steamers. As the Ganges enters Bengal it breaks into a number of streams, by which it makes its way to the ocean. The Hoogly, on which Calcutta stands, is one of these streams. Some of them are so shallow at certain seasons that native boats of considerable size cannot find sufficient water, and they are at that time impassable for steamers, though so constructed as to have the least possible draught. The result is that the steamers for the north-west (we believe none ply now) had to make a great detour, to go down the Hoogly to Saugor Island, and then to proceed by one of the channels there found to the main stream. This greatly increased the distance to the north-west. Except in the rainy season, steamers for Benares had to go about eight hundred miles. [Sidenote: THE SUNDERBUNS.] Of these three routes this one of the river steamers was in many respects the most convenient and pleasant, especially for persons new in the country, and my Calcutta friends kindly arranged that I should be sent on in this way. I accordingly embarked for Benares on a flat, tugged by a steamer, in the first week of March. After going down the Hoogly to Saugor Island, we made our way into the district called the Sunderbuns by one of the channels of the Ganges. We got into a labyrinth of streams, every here and there opening up into a wide reach of water, giving one the impression we were entering a lake; and shortly afterwards we found ourselves in a channel so narrow that we almost touched the banks on both sides, and which barely allowed a passage where there was a sharp turn in the stream. We had native pilots who knew the region thoroughly, and were in no danger of going astray. The land down to the water's edge was covered with the densest tropical vegetation, so that the banks often bounded our view, except when the trees on it were lower than those beyond. In the waters and out, wild beasts abound. Alligators were seen dropping from the banks into the stream on hearing the approach of the steamer. We saw no tigers, but we heard much about them as we were threading our way through that region. The previous year, early one morning, the watch on the deck of the flat was startled by a tiger leaping on board, and, evidently bewildered by its new circumstances, leaping off on the other side. Messrs. Lacroix and Gogerly, when on a native boat in the Sunderbuns, were witnesses of a desperate fight between a tiger and an alligator. The story has been often told.