During his long residence in India our traveller twice visited Bengal. Of his first journey into that province the date is unknown, but his second visit took place in 1667, the year in which he finally quitted the country. He seems, on this occasion, to have approached the place by sea, for we first find him coasting along the Sunderbund in a small native bark, with seven rowers, in which he ascended by one of the western branches of the Ganges to the town of Hoogly. The beauty of this immense delta, divided into innumerable islands by the various arms of the stream, and covered by a vegetation luxuriant even to rankness, delighted him exceedingly. Even then, however, many of these romantic isles had been deserted, owing principally to the dread of the pirates who infested the coast; and as in India the spots which cultivation abandons quickly become the abode of pestilential miasmata, which thenceforward forbid the residence of man, no one now ventured to disturb the tigers and their prey, which had taken possession of the soil. It was here that for the third time in his life he enjoyed the sight of that rare phenomenon, a lunar rainbow. He had caused his boat to be fastened to the branch of a tree, as far as possible from the shore, through dread of the tigers, and was himself keeping watch. The moon, then near its full, was shining serenely in the western sky, when, turning his eyes towards the opposite quarter, he beheld a pale, bright arch, spanning the earth, and looking like a phantom of the glorious bow which, impregnated with the rich light of the sun, gladdens the eye with its brilliant colours by day. Next night the phenomenon was repeated; and on the fourth evening another spectacle, now familiar to most readers by description, delighted our traveller and his boat’s crew. The woods on both sides of the stream seemed suddenly to be illuminated by a shower of fire, and glowed as if they had been clothed with leaves of moving flames. There was not a breath of wind stirring, and the heat was intense. This added to the effect of the scene; for as the countless little fires streamed hither and thither in columns, or separated, and fell like drops of rain, or rose thick like the sparks of a furnace, the two Portuguese pilots whom our traveller had taken on board, imagined they were so many demons. To add to the effect of this exhibition of fireflies, for, as the reader will have foreseen, it was they who were the actors, the swampy soil sent up a number of those earthly meteors which often glide over large morasses, some in the form of globes, which rose and fell slowly, like enormous rockets, while others assumed the shape of a tree of fire.