We crossed the parade, where all was life and animation; soldiers drilling, recruits on one leg doing the goose-step, drums beating, drill-sergeants shouting, and bugles sounding. We passed through the lines, thronged with sepoys in their graceful undress, and were soon at my friend’s bungalow, in which, after dismissing my bearers, I entered to take up my quarters. Rattleton gave me another shake, as if he had been working a pump handle and cordially bidding me welcome. A certain writer, who laid the scene of a romance in India, when not quite so well known as at present, describes our hero, I have been told, as sailing in a bungalow on the broad and placid surface of the Ganges, which, by a slight geographical error, is made to traverse the vale of Kashmere. Now, though I give my reader credit for knowing something more of the matter than this, a slight description of a bungalow may not be unacceptable, nevertheless. The houses occupied by Europeans in India are of two descriptions; the _pucka_ house—_havilee_, or _kottee_—and the bungalow. The former of brick or stone, is flat roofed, and, excepting in Calcutta, almost always of one story; _i.e._ the rooms are all on the ground floor, though considerably raised from the ground; they have green Venetian windows, and are encompassed, wholly or partially, by a terrace, covered with cement, shaded by a verandah or awning. The bungalow partakes more of the cottage, or, I should perhaps rather say, the barn, being, in nineteen cases out of twenty, covered with a ponderous thatch, requiring frequent renewal, the operations of the white ants and periodical rains soon converting it into a cake of mud, through which pactolean rills frequently find their way to the interior, meandering down the walls. The bungalow is invariably of one story, and constructed on the principle of a single or double-poled tent, or routie, according to the size; the resemblance to tents occupied by officers is indeed striking, though which is the original and which the copy I cannot say. It has usually double walls, though in some cases that which answers to the outer is little more than a range of pillars. The space between, called the verandah, is occupied by master’s palankeen, camp equipage, &c.; there, too, the bearers, or _cahars_, lie and snore during the sultry hours, till roused from their slumbers by a kick from master’s foot; there, too, the patient _dirgee_, or snip, sits cross-legged, hard at work on the beebee sahib’s ball-dress, or the sahib’s nether garments, which he holds on with his great toe and the next one to it with all the skill of the Order _Quadrumana_, to the astonishment of the griffinish beholder.