for it.' The coffee is hastily swallowed, compliments and good wishes are exchanged, a procession forms up and moves on, dignified and bright with uniforms where the Governor-General and his colleagues lead it, but a little ragged and playful in the rear. The band plays a march in the 'Puritani.' The troops who line the road on either side present arms. A great particoloured crowd looks on. The guns fire, the gentlemen wave their hats, the Governor-General walks down between the soldiers ('not so shy as he used to be at these ceremonies,' thinks his sister), returning the long salute. Arrived at the Ghát he makes his last adieux, gives his arm to Miss Eden, and steps on to his barge. 'There was a great deal of martial show,' writes her younger sister, the Honourable Frances Eden, in an unpublished Diary, 'and guns doing their salutes; we stepping gracefully on board, "clad in paradoxical emotion," the suit in which the immortal author of Santo Sebastiano always clothed his heroes.' The curtain thus falls on Lord Auckland's first term of residence in Calcutta. When next he walks in procession to the Ghát it will be to embark for England. Before then much will have happened. But at six in the morning of this twenty-first day of October, 1837, nothing of that is visible in the morning mists of the capital. So the spectators wave their handkerchiefs, and turn back to resume their gallop round the racecourse or hurry home to their early tea and toast, while the little group of travellers floats down the Húglí.
