path! big and little, wild and tamed, tushers
and toothless, of all heights, of all weights, of all
hues. A patent of nobility to a poor gentleman
with a miniature rent-roll bound in duodecimo, is
a white elephant of tremendous appetite; so is
knighthood to the honest leather-dresser made
mayor of the town by the inadvertence of
fortune, who offers the keys of the ancient city
to her Majesty, and receives them back with the
label of Sir attached to the handles; so is the
colonelcy of the volunteers with a government
salary of dimensions inadequate to the breadth
of gold lace required; so is the mastership of
the hunt, and so are the dogs kept at the old
hall, with Lawyer Hardfist's mortgages eating up
the land. They are all honours and glories, and
delights of the world and the flesh; but they
are all white elephants.

What is it but a white elephant when
that artist friend of yours generously presents
you with a proof before letters of his own
engraving? You don't want his proof before
letters; you have quite as many pictures on
your walls and brackets, and knick-knacks and
ornaments, as you care for, and you really cannot
afford a frame of sufficient quality to match
the excellence of the engraving, according to
your friend's arithmetic. Yet, it will not do
to dishonour his white elephant. You must
frame your engravings in gilded carving, and
study which is the best light as religiously
as you would study the Koran if you were
a Mussulman, or the Shasters if you were a
Brahmin. Your grandmother in a blue sash and
mushroom hat, is made to turn her back on your
grandfather in a full-bottomed periwig and snuff-
coloured coat, that your friend's proof may have
the post of honour on the wall; your favourite
Clyte is dismounted from the bracket that your
friend's proof may not be overshadowed in the
extreme left-hand corner just before sunset; and
when you have done all this, you find that the new
gilding makes the old look deplorably shabby, and
that you must have your whole wall-decoration
retouched, because of this new bright bit of goldleaf.
Is not this a white elephant? I often wish
that there were no such thing as a white elephant,
and that when people make presents or bestow
honours, they would give what was useful, and
not a great glaring magnificence which makes
everything else look mean, White elephants do
not do in donkey stalls: which is a great fact
too often overlooked.

HOUSEKEEPING IN INDIA.

PEOPLE in Europe frequently entertain the
idea that, in a hot climate, a house is of very
little importance. With savages in Australia,
and small annuitants in Italy, this is to some
extent the case. One of the savages—we have
it on the authority of a veracious writer—considered
a mansion which was presented to him,
in the light of an ingenious contrivance intended
to stand between him and the wind, and the
furniture it contained as so much fuel, to be
brought out when wanted, for the cooking of
his open air feasts—when he condescended to
cook them at all. Annuitants in Italy, we all
know, do not much care about what in England
we call a home. A place of resort where they
can meet their friends—which is of course a
café—ranks as the first necessity; but, in
fervidly hot India, the first question is, not how
you may make life agreeable abroad, but how
you may make it supportable at home. To an
European, most certainly a good house is the
first necessity, as in it he will probably find it
desirable to spend three-fourths of his time.

Domestic life in India presents the same
general features wherever you may happen to be
located; but there are particular features which
vary, and the variations mainly resolve
themselves into the difference between town and
country. In the presidencies—that is to say, in
Calcutta, Madras, or Bombay—you will live in
a house, although you may not occupy the
whole of it, with actual stories and stairs. In
the provinces you will abide in a bungalow—a
building which looks nearly all roof without,
and contains only one floor within, and that upon
the ground. Bengal will furnish as good a
comparison between the two as either of the other
presidencies; to Bengal, then, we will confine
our remarks.

The new arrival in Calcutta naturally goes in
the first place to an hotel. Time was, when a
man with a respectable coat and connexions
would have put up at the residence of the first
person he happened to light upon who had ever
seen or heard of him before. But Calcutta
hospitality has its limits, and it cannot extend itself
to Peninsular and Oriental ship-loads arriving
once a fortnight, and long-sea ship-loads arriving
whenever they can: so unless you have a
special invitation elsewhere, an hotel has
become a matter of course.

A house in the "City of Palaces" is very
apt to look like a palace. But the comparison
applies only to that portion of the town
where dwell the Europeans of the higher ranks,
the civil and military officers, and principal
merchants of the place. These congregate for
the most part in the Chowringhee-road and
the streets running therefrom, which make up
the only neighbourhood where it is conventionally
possible for a gentleman to reside.
The Chowringhee-road is the most pleasantly
situated thoroughfare in Calcutta. It resembles
the best part of Park-lane in having houses
only on one side of the way, the other side
opening upon the Maidan, which, apart from
the water, is by no means unlike the Park. The
houses, however, are larger than the majority of
those on the line from Piccadilly to Cumberlandgate,
and are more imposing from the outside:
the effect being mainly due to the large green
verandahs on the first floor, and the inevitable
jalousies to the windows—all of the same bright
hue, rendered brighter by contrast with the
white walk and clear atmosphere.

The "proper" thing for the new arrival,
who has an excuse for setting up an establishment