CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
with his wife and children, his ship, the Worcester, sprang a leak, the captain died, and the vessel narrowly escaped being wrecked on St. Helena, where the party landed, and paid one thousand pounds for a passage in the Dutton for the remainder of their journey. Those were the days when the captains of homeward-bound Indiamen demanded, and received, eight thousand rupees, or one thousand pounds for the passage of a single person, and fifteen hundred pounds for a married couple.
Divided from the home country by such tremendous obstacles, India was literally a land of exile to the Englishmen and women who dwelt there, and they seem to have done their best to gild their cage, and to compensate themselves for the loss of Western comfort, by indulgence in Eastern splendour. A curious old Anglo-Indian novel, called "The Baboo," gave a description of the forms and ceremonies surrounding the domestic life of a high official and his wife in Calcutta, in the early years of the nineteenth century. A typical scene presented the lady descending from her room in the studied negligé of a fashionable morning toilette, and passing to the breakfast table through the marshalled ranks of her retinue of servants all bowing low as she passed. These
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