6
CAWNPORE.
The principal door leads at once into the sitting-room, a spacious, ill-kept, comfortless apartment;
the most conspicuous article being a huge, oblong
frame of wood and canvass suspended across the
ceiling, and the prevailing impression an overwhelming sense of the presence of cobwebs.
The furniture,
which is scattered about in most unadmired disorder, is in the last stage of dilapidation.
Every
article in an Anglo-Indian household bears witness
to the fact that Englishmen regard themselves but
as sojourners in the locality where fate and the
quartermaster-general may have placed them.
A large rickety table in the centre of the room is
strewn with three or four empty soda-water bottles, a
half-emptied bottle of brandy, a corkscrew, glasses,
playing-cards, chessmen, an Hindostanee dictionary,
an inkstand, a revolver, a bundle of letters, a box
of cigars, the supplement of Bell’s Life, and a few
odd volumes from the regimental book-club ;—of no
very seductive quality, like enough, for the colonel's
lady has kept the new novels, and the doctor, who
is secretary to the club, has impounded the biographies, so that our ensign is fain to put up with
“Aids to Faith," and the third volume of the “History of the Inductive Sciences.”
Then there are
eight or ten chairs, a good half of which might well
claim to be invalided on the score of wounds and
