I was sitting in my barrack-rooms next morning after breakfast, amusing myself by pitching bones and crusts out of the window to a bevy of adjutant-birds below, opening their jaws expectingly, or clattering their huge beaks whilst contending for a bone, with the sound of marrow-bones and cleavers, when the door opened, and, to my agreeable surprise, in walked Captain Marpeet, his face radiant with smiles. A cordial greeting followed for, though coarse and illiterate for a man in his station, Marpeet was a warm-hearted, blunt, and generous fellow, and I had a sincere regard for him. Being an “old hand,” he assumed the Mentor towards Grundy and me, to which office, as it was not often offensively obtruded, I quietly submitted, with proper griffinish humility. “Well!” said he, looking up and down and round about, “so here you are, all snug and tight, regularly boxed up in this noisy hole?” “Any thing by way of exchange,” I replied, “after five months on ship-board; but to tell you the truth, it has its merits, and I rather like it on other grounds. Here, you see, I am, with all my comforts about me,” pointing rather ostentatiously to my two chairs, cot, and camp-table, and to my brazen chillumchee, in radiant brightness standing in the corner, “and from these, my head-quarters, I mean to sally out ever and anon, to mingle a little in the gay world of Calcutta, before I start for the Upper Provinces.” “Well,” said Marpeet, laughing; “I see, ‘for a griff,’ that you have a pretty good notion of things in general, and I don’t care if I join you in a spree or two before I leave. You griffs require an ‘old hand’ to look after you, or you will be always doing some soft thing or another. But have you been playing a knife and fork anywhere yet? been to any grand ‘feed’ since you arrived?” “Dinners and parties, eh? No, not as yet; but there is abundance of time for that, for it was only yesterday that I fired off a grand salvo of letters, which will doubtless, in due time, bring invitations ‘as thick as leaves on Vallombrosa.’” “Leaves on! pshaw! can’t you say ‘black-berries’ at once? I wish, Gernon, you were not so confoundedly poetical; I hate poetry mortally; it is griffinish; give me matters of fact, something I can understand. Dundas, or a number of the _Sporting Magazine_, or the like.” “There’s no help for it,” said I; “it’s my nature, and nature we may modify, but cannot radically change.” “Philosophizing; that’s worse still. But, joking apart, don’t be too sure of the invitations, or you may reckon without your host. I’m an ‘old hand’ (Marpeet’s everlasting boast), and have seen a little of Calcutta in my time, and I know, whatever the folks once were, they are now becoming most infernally _pucka_ (stingy), and will soon, I verily believe, be as bad as they are in England, where a leg o’mutton goes through the nineteen manœuvres before it is dismissed, and a man thinks he confers an everlasting obligation if he asks you to dinner.”