“As for the others you will see here, you may safely be left to the guidance of your own judgment and discretion in your conduct towards them.” I thanked Mrs. Delaval for her information, which, I saw, emanated from the purest feeling of womanly kindness, and promised to be on my guard, and endeavour to profit by it. CHAPTER XI. I must here interrupt the thread of my narrative, in order to give a few particulars respecting my host and his family, which may serve as samples of the olden time of India. The general was the youngest of the ten sons of Sir Gerald Capsicum, a fire-eating baronet of a “rare ould ancient Irish family,” and was sent to India about anno 1750, with little more than his sword, his brogue, and the family love of fighting wherewith to assist him on in the world. The general’s career had been varied, and he had gone through all the adventures, public and domestic, which usually happened to those whose lot, in respect to time and place, had been similarly cast. I have said the general was an Irishman; it follows as a natural consequence, that he was extremely susceptible of the tenderest of passions; and as in his early days there were few white dames in the land, like many others he e’en put up with a black one—attached himself to Sung Sittara Begum (the “Queen of Stars”), one of the gazelle-eyed daughters of Hind. This union, though not cemented by the forms of marriage, was, on the whole, more harmonious and enduring than many that are. I say on the whole; for if tradition may be depended on, the Queen of Stars was wont, now and then, to exhibit traits of vivacity, which were rather of a _striking_ than of a pleasing nature. With these trifling breaks, the union long harmoniously subsisted, and was not finally dissolved till the angel of death, one fine day, summoned the Begum to the seventh heaven. By the Begum, the general had Major John Capsicum, an officer in the service, and commanding the forces of his highness Ram Row Bhow Punt, the Jam of Ghurrumnugger, a Mahratta potentate of small note, whose territories it might be difficult to discover in the map; secondly, Augustus, an indigo planter in the district of Jessore, commonly called by the general’s native servants (who, like all the rest of the fraternity, were not _au fait_ at European names) “Disgustus Sahib;” and Mrs. Colonel Yellowly, a lady of high and indomitable spirit, who died some years before the period to which I am referring, and of whom I could learn little more from record or tradition than that she was rather celebrated for the manufacture of Chutnee and Dopiajah curry, talked a good deal of a certain _terra incognita_ called “home,” and ultimately went off rather suddenly,—as some affirm, from chagrin in consequence of having a point of precedence decided against her, arising out of a dispute with Lady Jiggs at a presidency party as to who _de jure_ should first come in or go out.