Marpeet would justify all this severity very logically, but I shall not trouble the reader with his reasons; certain it is, for all this, he paid his servants regularly, was in other respects kind, and on the whole very popular with them. Not far from the Chandney Choke, the principal thoroughfare in Delhi, near which I was now located, is the Duriba, or Lombard Street, where the principal shroffs or bankers reside; here also many venders of sweetmeats have their shops; one of these, in my day, was a jolly fellow, who, out of compliment to his great Western prototype, was called Mr. Birch, to which name he always answered when summoned to produce some of his choicest imitations of English “sugar-plumery.” I think I now see the good-natured fellow, hurrying out through his ranges of baskets with a few samples for inspection. Many a time and oft have Marpeet, I, and two or three jolly subs, after dinner, and under the agreeable stimulus of an extra dose of the rosy beverage, visited Mr. Birch, in the Duriba, all clinging to the pad of an elephant, whilst the lights blazed in the bazaars around, fakeers shouted, women chattered, and crowds of the faithful, moving hither and thither, gave a most Arabian-Nightish character to the scene. These scenes of the past come over me sometimes, when my heart is sorrowfully disposed, with a sadly-painful distinctness; the laughing faces of those who participated in them are vividly before me, but they, “my co-mates and brothers in exile,” where are they? Alas! with a sigh I must answer the question—gone! gone! Others occupy their places; they will soon disappear to make way for more; “and thus wags the world.” Oh, life, life! sad are thy retrospects to the best of us, and great are the trials thou hast for even him whose lot is cast in the pleasantest places; in thy sweetest pleasures lurk the germs of thy greatest sufferings, and the more we cultivate and refine our natures, the more acutely do we feel thy sorrows! Happy ignorance! fortunate credulity! blessed insensibility! ye all seem to have your soothing opiates; whilst he who girds up his loins to seek the talisman of truth from amidst its innumerable counterfeits—compensation for the past and something like certainty for the future—finds the farther he moves the less he knows, and, amazed and confounded at the profound and mighty mystery which surrounds him, at length sits down and weeps. Well may we exclaim, “The ways of Heaven are dark and intricate, Puzzled in mazes and perplex’d in error, The understanding traces them in vain.”