It is, however, certain that much ignorance, not unmixed with the old anti-Nabob prejudice, still prevails regarding the ways and habits of our countrymen in India. The most absurd inquiries are addressed to people who have been in India, which doubtless sometimes provoke answers more suited to the intellectual acquirements of the questioner than in actual accordance with the real facts of the case. If your fair and charming companion at a dinner-party persists in her conversation in filling all Indian houses with snakes and scorpions, she will be much more gratified to hear a few anecdotes which accord with her own assertions, than she would be to learn that it is possible to live for years in some parts of India without seeing either a snake or a scorpion. When recent editions of popular Indian hand-books solemnly inform the reader that rhinoceros hunting is an ordinary amusement in the suburbs of Calcutta, it is much easier to acquiesce in that information than to urge respectfully that alligators may sometimes be found in the ornamental waters of Battersea Park. One of the greatest changes that has come over India in the last thirty years is to be found in the very great addition that has taken place to the numbers of the non-official classes. Fifty years ago Indian society consisted chiefly of the military and civil servants of the Indian Government. In Calcutta the judges, barristers, and other legal officials formed almost a separate set in the local society. Then came the great merchants, the representatives of the few but famous old commercial houses, whose names were from time to time mixed up with fabulous wealth and hopeless insolvency. In the interior of the country there were many parts where the face of a non-official European was unknown, whilst in some districts a few hardy Englishmen and Scotchmen were to be found engaged in the precarious cultivation of indigo or the manufacture of sugar, or in managing and farming the lands of native land-owners. But, taken all together, the non-official classes of Englishmen were counted by hundreds, where now they are numbered by thousands. In such a community the Governor-General and the members of his Council were pre-eminently the makers and rulers of society; and as in those days these great official people did not all run away to the hills of Simla and other mountain stations as soon as the weather became hot, the impress of their authority was never wanting in social life. The great annual ball at Government House in Calcutta on the Queen’s birthday (which is usually one of the hottest days of the year) was looked forward to by all classes with the deepest interest and anxiety, and it was on this occasion especially that the pretty half-caste girls of Calcutta had an opportunity of making their _début_ in the grand world, to make havoc of the hearts of the gay young civilians and cadets and ensigns who were then amongst the acknowledged rulers of the society in the capital.