"You change suddenly from the wealthy and aristocratic part of Calcutta to the Black Town; one minute you are among palaces, and the next in the midst of hovels. Some of the grand avenues have wretched little streets leading from them, and the more you look around in Calcutta the more do you find these contrasts. The only relief to the general squalor of the Black Town is an occasional palm-tree, that half looks as if it was ashamed to be here. The native children play in the dust or mud of the streets as though they were a part of it, and their parents encourage them in the sport. It is to their credit that they never pelt strangers with the mud, as they would be apt to do in some other parts of the world. "One of the native streets is a bazaar for the sale of Oriental goods, and if you go through it you are pestered with peddlers from the time you enter till you leave. They have all sorts of things to sell, such as India shawls of a great many kinds, jewellery from various parts of the country, shell work from Singapore, and numerous things from China, Japan, and other Oriental countries. The peddlers and shopkeepers invariably ask two or three times as much as they expect to get, and of course the purchaser must meet them by offering only a half or a third of what he is willing to give. Then you haggle and haggle, and after a while the medium is reached and the bargain closed. This kind of trading is a great trial of patience, and it is not a wise thing for an ill-natured man to undertake bargaining with a native, as he is very likely to lose his temper. "There are many other things in Calcutta we would like to write about, but we are too busy to put everything down; and, besides, if we told you of all we saw, it would be necessary to have a couple of clerks to take our notes and fill them out. Then, too, there is much to see in other parts of India, and we must move on. We leave to-night on the train for Benares, and, as our time is limited, we shall not stop on the way. We send this letter by the weekly mail that leaves Bombay every Saturday when the south-west monsoon is blowing, and every Monday when there is no monsoon. The train from here takes sixty hours to go to Bombay, and so we must post our letter three days in advance of the steamer's sailing." They left according to their programme: the regular mail-train for passengers going through to the northward or to Bombay starts at nine P.M., and has always done so since the line was first opened. While they were waiting at the station Doctor Bronson told the boys of an interesting occurrence connected with the departure of the train. It was about as follows: