Of this lady, as one of a class, I must present the reader with a slight memoir. Mrs. Brownstout, after the loss of her husband, “her poor dear Browny,” as she always called him, had nobly set her shoulder to the wheel, and, with all that admirable perseverance quickened by a lively sense of duty and parental affection, which the sex (and none more so than Indian widows) thus circumstanced so often exhibit, had fought a stout battle for her children; for two sons she had obtained military appointments in India, having (armed with those potent weapons, the prayers of the widow and the orphan) laid siege to a good-hearted director, and carried him by storm, after a feeble show of resistance on his part; and for a third she had obtained the management of an indigo factory. Of three daughters, one had married a doctor within hail of the Medical Board, and Lucinda and Maria were still unmarried, though it was shrewdly suspected they had no intention to die vestal virgins, if it could be decently avoided. Mrs. Major Brownstout was rather dark, and in Abyssinia, where bulk and beauty are synonymous, would have been considered a remarkably fine woman; but as it was, she exceeded the English standard of beauty by some five or six stone. Fatness and good-humour are almost invariably found united, but which is the cause and which the effect—whether fat breeds good-nature or good-nature fat—is one of those profound mysteries of nature which old Burton might decide, but for which I have in vain sought a satisfactory solution. Mrs. Brownstout was quick, penetrating, and possessed a large fund of that frankness and kindliness of heart which I have, in the course of my Eastern experience, almost invariably found to characterize the ladies of mixed blood in India. Society full oft, by its folly, oppression, and prejudice, begets the faults which it affects to hate and despise; and the fact of any classes being looked down upon, which is more or less the case as regards the half-caste or Eurasian throughout India (though less so in Bengal than in the sister presidencies), has a depressing tendency, which naturally places individuals of that description in a highly disadvantageous position, deadening the energies, and preventing that free and natural play and expansion of the mind and feelings which are ever the results of knowing that we stand well with the world.