After a summer of eight months in the Bengal lowlands with a constant temperature of 90° to 100° Fahrenheit in the shade, fresh breezes and cool air become luxuries more keenly enjoyed than those who live in a more temperate climate can conceive. To benefit by both I made a short journey in October, 1882, to the celebrated Himalaya mountains, among which the city of Darjieling is situated. The train on the Bengal railroad carried us about three hundred miles in a northerly direction through a level lowland teeming with gardens, palm groves and rice fields, to Siligori, at the foot of the mountains, where we arrived in the morning at sunrise. Having enjoyed a good breakfast and a bottle of Norwegian export beer at the railway eating house, we were transferred to a train on the Darjieling & Himalaya railroad to be carried up seven thousand feet high in a distance of forty-two miles. This mountain railroad is so different from all other railroads that it deserves a special description. It is narrow gauged in the fullest sense of the word, the distance between the rails being only two feet. The cars are very small and low, and the wheels are about twelve inches in diameter. The car is ten feet long and six feet wide, and contains four seats, each of which accommodates four persons; it is open on the sides so that passengers can get on and off easily and have an open view. The locomotive is no larger than the cars, but powerful enough to pull ten or twelve of them up the mountain at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. Nowhere is the track straight even for a distance of a couple of hundred yards, but it winds right and left in the most fantastic manner, and reminded me strikingly of the lines described in one of the old country dances. The signal is given, the pigmy locomotive puffs and sputters, the train with its load of humanity rolls away up hills and mountains and across awful chasms, up, up, up; hour after hour, with a grade of one to eighteen and twenty-eight, or on an average of twenty-three feet. It winds along the rugged mountain side, over awful chasms, and with such short curves that one's hair stands on end when looking down or up the steep cliffs, the summits of which tower above the clouds. A loose stone rolling down, a broken rail, or a derailment would immediately hurl the iron horse with its cars and human lives thousands of feet down to the bottom of the abyss, and reduce the whole to an unrecognizable wreck. Beautiful trees, grass, flowers, creeping plants adorn hills and vales except in the ravines and cliffs, where foaming creeks and cataracts have torn away the vegetation by tumultuously tossing themselves from rock to rock, from cliff to cliff, from valley to valley, gradually uniting in the rivers that continually feed the mighty Ganges.