There, dear reader, match that in Europe, if you can! "Why this is a real Vade Mecum; and, mark you! a _most_ useful one--one equally adapted for ladies in general as for gentlemen, or in fact for _all_ persons." Doubtless it will have a prodigious circulation as soon as its merits are fully known. I have not met with any one who has read it. Books published in India, whatever may be their nature, seldom repay the cost of print and paper. Even the Calcutta newspapers have between them all no more than three or four thousand subscribers, and yet our countrymen there read a great deal. But the works which have emanated from the pens of Anglo-Indian writers have in general been so dull and spiritless, that the community has learned to regard all such with indifference; and as the booksellers regularly supply the newest and best European productions, these inferior viands are almost entirely neglected. An annual has once or twice been published, but did not meet with sufficient patronage to allow of its being regularly continued. The police of India has always been inefficient. Robberies committed under the very noses of the watchmen are common. When they should be on the look-out, they are found sleeping, and when they are awake are careless and negligent. The worst of them in all India are to be found in its great metropolis; in Calcutta, indeed, they seem to possess no honesty or fidelity, and often turn out greater rogues than those they bring to justice. Policemen in the confidence of the European authorities have before now been discovered to be at the head of parties of Thugs, to whom they have thus had the means of communicating all necessary intelligence. The native _employés_ in our courts of justice are equally corrupt. Every Hindoo and Mussulman who has occasion to resort to these courts, takes with him a bribe, knowing that unless he does so, it will be all but impossible for him to obtain a fair and impartial hearing. The _omlah_ who should decline a bribe, would be accounted a fool by his fellow officials. And so some of them make fortunes; _e. g._, a _sheristader_ at one of our civil courts, who had been only ten years in that office, on a salary of one hundred rupees a month, and with no other income save a trifling share in a small patrimonial estate, managed, a short time back, to purchase landed property to the value of fifty thousand rupees. Enter a criminal court, whether the deponent swear by the water of the Ganges held in his hand, or by the Koran laid on his head, or by licking off salt from a sword, or by placing a milk-jug on his back, or any other mode practised among them, you will find that perjury and the grossest exaggeration are with him far more common than truth. If he has received a light box or a gentle kick, he will make oath that he has been half murdered; and if he has been robbed of an article worth twenty rupees, will swear its value was a hundred!