“Breakfast with you! No, hang me if I do: d’ye mean to insult me, sir? What! a man, after a voyage, with hardly a shot in his locker, ask a gentleman on shore, with a Yorkshire ham on his table, to breakfast with him! never heard such a proposal in all my life! No, come, come along, or I must march you all up under a file of Jacks.” All this, which I overheard very distinctly, and which was uttered at the top of an iron pair of lungs, was intended for heartiness and jocularity. No doubt there was kindness in it, and with mortals as rough as himself, it might doubtless have answered very well; but the captain, I could see, evidently winced under the infliction, though bent apparently on enduring it for a season, with proper resignation. After finishing our toilets, and a few other little arrangements, we joined the colonel, who would take no refusal, on the bund or esplanade. Captain Belfield introduced his sister and me. The colonel, on being presented to the former, raised his hat, and made as much of a bend as the sphericity of his form would allow; at the same time thrusting forth a leg far better adapted (to borrow the corn-law phraseology) for a “fixed duty” than the “sliding scale,” with the air of a finished man of gallantry. There was something so irresistibly comic in the momentarily assumed suavity of this huge _Ursa Major_ (or _Ursa Colonel_, as Paddy would say), this attempt at the easy movement of the lady’s man, that I was constrained to turn aside my head, in order to conceal a laugh. The colonel gave us a superb breakfast and it was plainly observable that his reputation as a _gastronome_ had not been overrated. Ham, fish, jellies, butter, creams, cakes—all the profusion of an Indian breakfast—were severally the very best of their kinds; moreover, Colonel Bluff gave the history of every article, telling us to lay on, and spare not, as we should not meet with any like them between that and Mr. Havell’s, the provisioner’s, at Dinapore. The dinner was equally remarkable for its goodness and profusion; Chittagong fowls, as big as turkeys, were there, and a saddle of mutton cased with two inches of fat, on which the colonel gazed with as much pride as some tender parent would look on a favourite child. He had invited some eight or ten of the ladies and gentlemen of the station to meet us, and it was soon abundantly clear that the captain had drawn a most accurate sketch of his friend’s character. After the former had retired, he began to let out a little more of it. Seated at the head of his table—his burly King Hal person filling his capacious arm-chair—figure a little obliqued, a napkin over his knee, and the bottles in array before him, the jolly colonel looked the very personification of absolutism and animalism.