Hitherto we have written of “kings and tetrarchs and all great things” in India. Now let us go to a different degree in the social scale, to those who were alluded to as the real colonists of India in the first of these chapters. There are now hundreds, or rather thousands, of our countrymen settled in India who may be taken as representing the middle-classes of England; though it might be more correct to use the public-school term, the “upper-middle” classes. Some of these are employed in the cultivation and manufacture of indigo, or sugar, or jute, or other mercantile produce, in the hot and steamy plains of Bengal. Others, who are engaged in the management of tea gardens, occupy hilly tracts, many of which are as hot and steamy as the plains; though some tea is grown at high altitudes, and in a comparatively cooler climate, as on the mountain-slopes around Darjeling. Others are employed in managing and working the railways which now traverse the length and breadth of the country, and for these there is no escape from all the perils and vicissitudes of the greatest heat. In most of the large towns throughout the country there are established firms of merchants, of which some of the partners are constantly flitting backwards and forwards between India and England, though there is always some local representative of the name and business of the firm left in India. Amongst the trading or shop-keeping classes there are some who have their branch “establishments” at the great hill stations, such as Simla, to which they migrate in order to escape from the heat of the plains when the Court and fashion of the capital retire there with a similar object.