"The name of this city is supposed to be derived from _Bonne Baie_ (Good Bay, or Harbor), which it was called by the Portuguese more than 300 years ago. The harbor is the finest in all India, as it is twelve or fourteen miles long, by five or six in width; the city stands on an island about the length and shape of the one where New York is built, and in other respects it reminds you of the commercial metropolis of the United States. Bombay has its business section at the lower end, and its residences elsewhere, very much as we find things in New York; it has its Stock Exchange and other places of speculation, and when we went to the Apollo Bunder, or general landing-place, we were reminded of Whitehall and Castle Garden. The creek that separates it from the main-land, or rather from the larger island of Salsette, has been bridged over, like the Harlem River, and the railway comes into Bombay, very much as it does into New York. We could make other comparisons, but the above are sufficient to show that we feel at home in this great city of India. "The lower part of Bombay is called the Fort, and it had a good right to have that name down to within the past twenty years. Bombay was the first settlement of the English in India; it was bought by the Portuguese from the Moslems, who conquered it near the end of the fourteenth century, and held by them till 1562, when it was given as a part of the dowry of a Portuguese princess on her marriage with King Charles II. of England. When the East India Company began operations it rented the island of Bombay from the king for ten pounds a year, and continued to pay that rental till 1858, when the Company went out of existence. A fort was built on the lower end of the island, just as one was built about the same time at New Amsterdam (afterward New York), and it stood there till the invention of modern artillery made it useless as a place of defence. Many fine buildings have been erected on the site of the fort and on its esplanade, and as you wander about the streets you are constantly impressed with the business activity that prevails. "In the Fort there are many fine public buildings that must have cost a great deal of money; there are some nice bungalows, or private residences, at Byculla, which may be called the Fifth Avenue of Bombay, and also on Malabar Hill, which corresponds to the upper part of Manhattan Island, in the vicinity of the Boulevard. They tell us that during the American Civil War there was the wildest kind of speculation in Bombay, and enormous fortunes were made and lost; when the crash came everybody suffered; and even to-day the city has not wholly recovered. The high price of cotton caused everybody to speculate in it, and for a while Bombay appeared to be the most prosperous city in the world. "We will try to tell what we have seen since we came here, but there is so much of it that we shall be sure to forget something. [Illustration: A PARSEE MERCHANT.]