TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OF A COSMOPOLITE'S LIFE;

BEING

PAGES OF ADVENTURE AND TRAVEL.

CHAPTER VIII.

A DISASTER AND ITS RESULTS.

careful ant or bee, in laying up a substantial harvest against the day of need. Squirrels had lined felonies, committed in doors and out of doors, their winter nests with the proceeds of manifold even to the extent of rifling couch cushions, and bedding of cotton, for the better accommodation of the young sqirrels expectant. As for the generality of birds, sparrows excepted, they had all betaken themselves for the season to the milder and less boisterous temperature of Mysore, and other countries beyond the Ghauts. Only the swallows and the wild pigeons, of all the migratory birds, remained, and these found ample shel

BARELY Six months had elapsed from our taking possession of the house at Deramapatam before the north-east monsoon set in. I had witnessed the effects of their periodical rains and tempests in other parts of India; but never yet on the coast of Malabar; where, comparatively speaking, their force was as giant strength to pigmy play. For weeks before the first outburst, preparations had been going on on an extensive scale, both be low and aloft. Below, husbandmen laboured hard early and late, to warehouse their grain and straw before the damp should irretrievably ruin them; natives of all denominations and descriptions, assisted by other members of their families, were busily engaged fresh thatching their miserable huts, low growl of incessant distant thunder, and the Heavy, gloomy days and oppressive nights-the gathering in charcoal, firewood, and cowdung, for fuel; mats were spread on terrace tops and plat- occasional fiery streaks of forked lightning in the forms, covered with pepper, chillies, the various in-heavy black bank, which was increasing in bulk gredients that constitute a curry, pickles, tamarinds, and many other odds and ends that required a good sunning and plenty of air before they

were transferred to the earthenware vessels whence they would be removed only as the necessity of the household required. Teams of oxen, with dismally groaning yokes, whirled round ponderous stone wheels, between which round cocoa-nuts were crushed into anything but odoriferous oil, and whole parties of women and children were busy in sorting the husks from the newly collected paddy, and then washing and cleansing the rice from all stones and dirt. Huge jars of oil and arrack, festoons of onions, red chillies and garlic, strings of what to all appearance seemed to be the heels of old boots, but which in reality were buffalo meat dried in the sun; these and the other Indian dainties, together with a variety of infantine and shapeless rags were exposed out of doors, for sunning and airing. Fodder and grain were hoarded up for cattle, and water-tight sheds erected for their convenience. Old men, half-blind and decrepid, who occupied certain spots during given hours of the day, deserted these as the air became charged with vapid humours, and betook themselves to the miserable consolation of smoky wood fires, in huts that children could barely stand upright in. Crows, those plagues of India, grew more thievish and noisy than ever, fearful for the fate of their nests and young ones, which were perched upon the tallest cocoanut trees, yet so imbecile with all their rascality, as to prefer stealing silver tea spoons and butter to imitating the

* A spirit extracted from the cocoa-nut tree.

ter and food amongst the roofs of the houses, or the deep caverns and recesses that literally dissected the cliffs in all directions.

day by day. The sea looked calm, but sluggish
and black; its surface like the face of some deep
plotting villain, who strove, but strove vainly, to
cast a superficial cloak of serenity over a turbid
and restless storm of passion and evil, raging be-
neath. Mournful was it in the oppressive still-
ness of early morning, or late in the evening, to
sit and listen to the low murmuring of the waves,
as they washed against the sea-sand and shingle of
Then,
the beach, far below our dwelling place.
as the sun sank, wan and pale, as though sick
with emotion, behind the heavy pile that girt the
ocean's horizon, the melancholy bleating of a few
wretched goats, the distant whistle of their shep-
herd, the lark's evening hymn, gradually subsiding
into and lost in the louder hoot of the screech-
owl: all these had a sombre, an overwhelming
effect upon my young and solitary mind, and some.
how or other, led to a vague and superstitious pre-
sentiment of pending evil. Doubtless, something
heavy in the atmosphere tended to relax our
nerves, but, more or less, every individual com-
plained of the same lassitude, and all wished that
the dreaded, and yet longed-for, monsoon would
explode its first fury, and revive parched nature
and our fevered frames by moistening the earth,
and cooling the atmosphere around.

At last, one more than ordinarily sultry evening, when the moon scarce dared peep forth from the misty veil of fog that enveloped the heavens, -of a sudden there burst upon us the roar as of many waters rushing from their bounds, and overwhelming the earth with the fury of their torrents. Scarcely had the servants and all the palanquin beaters been summoned to the succour, before the

298

the

very

A DISASTER AND ITS RESULTS.

the wind had entirely abated, and the sea had
calmed down again; but as for damp and gloomy
weather, nothing can bear comparison to Telli-
cherry, during the prevalence of these monsoons.
Many of the rooms were almost too dark to see
to read in, all too damp to remain idly seated in
with impunity. Like troubled spirits we wan-
dered from wing to wing, still haunted by the
dreary aspect around us, and by the incessant dis-
mal pattering of the rain upon the tiled roofs.
As for the state of affairs out of doors, nothing
more wretched can be conceived. Every shrub
was under water, and, as a natural result of this
inundation, the house was besieged with vermin
and reptiles, driven from their haunts. Suakes,
centipedes, rats, mongooses, even jackals pene-
trated into our lower floors, and met with a most
inhospitable reception. Many birds also, some of
the most timid, flew into our bedrooms, and con-
descended to feed off the floor, from crumbs and
other substances thrown them for their sustenance.
The old coachman and the horses were completely
cut off from all communication with the house,
and every one must have perished of starvation,
had not ample stores of many of the necessaries
of life been gathered in by the forethought of our
butler, who had lived at Tellicherry before, and
who happened to know what the monsoons in
All communication with
these parts were like.
Tellicherry proper had been entirely cut off-not
even the postman dared to venture across with the
ferry. At the expiration of this fortnight, how-
ever, the rains ceased, and the waters rapidly
abated. One day's sunshine did wonders towards
drying up humidity, and a week would doubtless
have set us all to rights again. But such was not
to be the case, and the result was, that after
the lapse of so many years, my recollections of
the last days spent in that princely mansion at
Deramapatam are blended with a solemn indescri-
bable sorrow, which seems to tinge the whole place
with the sombre hue of mourning.

avant-courier of the tempest swept over the promontory where our house was situated. What shall I liken it to? The wind blew so hard that it seemed absolutely to prevent the heavy and incessant torrents of rain from touching the earth; but, lifting them up, bore them, as it were, on its wings till the waters rushed by, a perpetual and resistless stream. Then, as for the lightning, in all my subsequent experience and travel, I never witnessed anything more grand and impressive. The whole earth seemed flooded with light, whilst arches of the skies must have tottered beneath the frequent and sublimely awful thundering of Heaven's loud artillery. That night, none of us repaired to rest; many parts of the house leaked like a sieve; others admitted of the wind to such an extent that all our joint skill and strength could barely suffice to prevent entire windows and doors from being wrenched from their hinges, and hurled up into the air, none could tell where. In the midst of all this turmoil and uproar of the elements, when the miserable heat of a damp wood fire barely sufficed to keep the damp out of our only habitable room, and we were dependent for light upon the flickering and uncertain light of a wretched old horn lantern; in the midst of this, the old lady grew turbulent beyond passive endurance, persisting-poor old soul! -that that inevitable rebellion was close at hand, and that our only chance of safety lay in immediate flight through the hideous tempest then raging around. Nor did she confine herself to suggestions, but availing herself of an opportunity afforded by the sudden bursting of one of the windows to the windward, she managed to escape the vigilance of my sisters, and instantly got out into the compound, bareheaded and exposed, till turning a sudden angle of the house brought her into full contact with the storm, which literally lifted her up, and blew her back again as easily as a child might blow a feather. Her scream of pain and alarm was the first notification we had of Naturally of a restless and active disposition, her absence, and when C. had lifted her in and nothing could have annoyed poor C. more grievplaced her on a temporary couch, she sank into a slumber under the influence of a mild narcotic-ously than the constraint imposed upon him by the nothing the worse for her tussle with the winds, if I may except the fright and nervous excitement of the moment.

pros

Next morning what a scene of desolation presented itself! How had the mighty fallen! The stately teak trees of a century's growth lay grovelling in mud and water, whilst cocoa-nut trees by scores had been torn up by the roots and trated. Nor was this all the damage entailed by the fury of the last night's gale. Many a gallant bark, caught unawares in the dangerous proximity of a sea shore, had been thrown headlong amongst the furious waves, now surgiug in upon the beach, and but few, very few, of their crews had survived to tell the tale of their sufferings and woes the preceding night.

With little or no abatement the rain continued to pour down in torrents for the ensuing fortnight;

Nothing formidable inclemency of the weather. daunted, however, and despite the entreaties of my sisters, he would persist in snipe-shooting day after day, coming back chilled and wet through to the skin, besides having very little in the shape of game to recompense him for such labour and

exposure.

One morning, not feeling very well, he sent for a barber that lived close by, who bled him. Medical men there were none within hail, save the Civil Surgeon, who lived ten miles away from us, and who at that period was a sad invalid himself, and indeed had been confined to his bed for several weeks past. After having been bled, C., who felt himself much better, made a hearty breakfast, and then shouldering his gun, sallied forth in pursuit of the usual game. That day, snipe were more abundant than they had been previously.

REDUCTION OF ESTABLISHMENT.

Elated with success, he prolonged the sport until
He then
perfectly saturated from head to foot.
came back, weary aud footsore, took a glass of
Dinner was served
sherry, and dressed for dinner.

at seven, and we had all partaken of soup, and
Poor C. raised the
were helped to roast fowl.
first mouthful to his lips, and then suddenly, with-
out groan or effort, fell back dead in his chair.
Alas! woe is me! not all the love we nurtured
for him, not all our prayers or care could awaken
again one glad beam of affection from those eyes,
one sound from that dearly loved, cherished voice.
In an instant he had been taken from amongst
us; and as, with tearful eyes and aching heart, I
watched his poor ashes lowered into their last
receptacle, the hooting of an accursed owl from
some nook in the ruined Protestant Church seemed
distinctly to say-" With him lie buried your future
hopes of happiness and success through life."

CHAPTER IX.

REDUCTION OF ESTABLISHMENT.

THE sudden and melancholy end of poor C., who
was taken from us apparently in robust health,
and when only just entering upon the prime of
life, created a profound sympathy amongst the
few Europeans resident at Tellicherry, and we were
perfectly besieged with offers of hospitality, until
such time as we could look around and determine
upon some spot for future residence. As I have
already stated, my sister Ellen was the widow of
a colonel, and she consequently enjoyed a pension
adequate to the wants of the whole of us-more
especially in so cheap and retired a part of India.
After some little hesitation, therefore, we became
the guests of Mr. and Mrs. V—n, who resided in
Tellicherry proper. Mr. V-n was the second
judge on circuit, and next in rank to the fiery old
His wife was a
gentleman before alluded to.
most amiable and agreeable lady, and, what was a
great thing for me, she kept an English nursemaid,
very young and pretty, and who, boy as I was, must
have captured what little heart I then had to boast of.
In a childish way, and vastly to the amusement of
the ladies, who were eaves-droppers, I made fierce
love to her. Whenever she was engaged in iron-
ing out the children's linen, I would sit by the
hour hard by, and read from marvellous fairy tales,
or equally marvellous books on natural history,
which had been picked up from some itinerant book
vendor, and were almost antediluvian as to date.
On one of these occasions, in my great anxiety
to show my learning to Mary, I quite astonished
her weak mind by coolly assuring her that there
was a large bird in Bengal, and which was known
to naturalists as the quarter-master.

"Indeed," said Mary "I never heard of that before, sir, but I have heard of a bird called the adjutant."

It was no use her trying to argue me out of

my dictum. I blushed to think that she had detected me in an error, and was yet simpleton enough not to coufess myself in the wrong.

A fortnight elapsed, and in that interval the greater part of poor C.'s establishment had been broken up and brought to the hammer. My sister, however, owned much of the household furniture, inclusive of the carriage and carriage horses, and doubtless, thinking the expense and trouble of another journey a thing not lightly to be undertaken, she rented a small but very comfortable little house in the centre of the town; which boasted of a pretty fair walled-in garden, was opposite the fort, the master-attendant's, and the church and close alongside of the sub-collector's house, and the quarters occupied by the officers commanding the detachment of native infantry. We retained all our old servants, and in the course of a few months settled down into a very comfortable, easy kind of life. My poor pony and gun were both gone, and although I missed them considerably at first, I formed acquaintance. with several Portuguese youths of my own age, with whom I romped and played during the cooler hours of the day, whilst the remainder was devoted to my studies, to which I now settled down with more earnestness than I ever evinced before.

One good arising from my mixing with Portuguese youth was the facility with which I acquired their language, which though only a patois of the pure mother tongue, rendered me much service in after years, during my long sojourn in India. I was also naturally anddoatingly fond of music, so it was not long before I could sing many a lively Portuguese air to the intense delight of my guardian with the few friends she occasionally assembled round her of an evening.

Whilst living at Deramapatam the distance had almost entirely secluded us from mingling with tho other European families; now we were right in the centre of them all, and very shortly became intimately acquainted. Though few in number, they were mostly oddities in their way. There was old Mr. N., the excellent-hearted third judge, as eccentric as, and in many things who was resembled, the character painted of George III. His visits were a visitation to me, for he invariably put me through a course of Latin Grammar, of which I was egregiously ignorant, and asked so many and such rapid questions, without ever pausing for a reply, that I might well have exclaimed with the clodhopper

May I be cust,

If I knows which to answer fust.

A more benevolent soul never stepped in shoe-
He was perpetually seeking out and
leather.
relieving objects of affliction, and yet, poor man,
he had the misfortune, the unspeakable sorrow, of
being a widower with one only daughter, and that
girl a confirmed and furious lunatic. Doatingly
fond of her, he was lavish in expense for her every
comfort, and kept her confined, but without

TRAVELLING BY DAWK.

least a very agreeble nice kind of a friend. Somebody else besides myself simultaneously underwent a like metamorphose. B. had been hardly gone a month from Tellicherry when, one fine morning, my sister Ellen received a densly crossed and recrossed letter, the contents of which, to my intense surprise, set her capering about the room with such downright earnest joy, that the large tortoiseshell comb in the back of her head flew up to the ceiling, and falling down again was smashed to atoms. She did not care a farthing, however, for such slight disasters, but when her joy would permit, and when my other sister's and my grandmother's unfeigned astonishment had subsided a little, then she let us know the contents of that, to her, so precious letter.

It contained a proposal of marriage from Mr. B.

CHAPTER X.

TRAVELLING BY DAWK.

301

[ that ought to be adopted with regard to myselffor which latter reason I cordially hated her, and looked forward with intense anxiety for the day of our departure; for, of a truth, this old lady was a perfect nightmare to me, and though when I shook hands and kissed her in taking leave with a callous indifference, though I never again set eyes upon her on earth, never heard from, and seldom ever of her, I have more reason, as the sequel of this work shall presently show, to be grateful for her kind recollection of me than I have to any other member of my ouce numerous family.

As there was no gentleman to accompany us in our travels this time, and as our party would be diminished to my sister, my grandmother, and myself, it was arranged that we should go to Bangalore by dawk-that is to say, travel post by palanquin, as by this method we might hope to accomplish the distance in little more than a week. The collectors of the various districts through which we were about to travel, accordingly received instructions to post the requisite number of sets of bearers at equal distances of twenty miles apart, and when we heard that these necessary preliminaries had been arranged, then, well supBefore breaking up our estab-plied with ham sandwiches, and other creature lishment, however, it was deemed expedient to comforts indispensable by the road (for we would await the visit of one of my aunts, the wife of a never stop long enough to admit of our cooking colonel in the Bombay army, and the only surviv- anything), we jumped into our palanquins, and ing child of my grandmother, who was coming were carried off at full speed, bidding adieu over with the intention of persuading my sister to Tellicherry and Cananore, for many a long year Harriet to return with her to her own house, and, to come. Two amongst us for ever. in short-as she was herself childless-become their adopted daughter.

THE receipt of the letter alluded to in the last chapter was the signal for us to be once more on the move.

In due time my aunt arrived on board of a Dhoney, and I was sent on board to chaperon her ashore. I had never before been on board of a Dhoney, and when I at length succeeded in climbing up on deck, I was really quite surprised how anybody could trust a cat's life to such an abominable, cranky old thing, swarming, as it was, with cockroaches, and redolent of salt fish and rancid ghee. My aunt, however, had had no alternative, as she came from an up country station, where European vessels seldom ever touched.

Having succeeded in getting my aunt and her servants ashore, I found time to meditate upon their personal appearance, and I grieve to say that a passion for caricaturing soon evinced itself in my manifold efforts to paint an exact fac-simile of what appeared to me one of the queerest looking ladies I had ever set eyes on. Aunt Rebecca had a strange partiality, and adhered with the pertinacity of a leech, to fashions that had been in vogue when she was a young damsel of some fifteen or sixteen years old. Her dresses had waists that reached no lower than just under the armpits, and though of costly materials, looked so absurdly grotesque, that they cost me many a sound box on the ear by giving rise to some insolent comment. Every other article of dress was in keeping with the gown; so were her manners and ideas; so, ;ls, her notion as to the discipline and regime

This travelling by dawk, especially when the novelty of the thing once wore off, was anything but agreeable, though very expeditious. Being cooped up in a palanquin day and night, with barely a minute to stretch one's limbs, produced vile cramps which were almost insupportable. As for the old lady, we were compelled to lock the palanquin doors, as, travelling at the rate we were, she might have managed to slip out of her palanquin unperceived, and have lost herself in the dense jungle through which our way lay for the first two or three days. Another horrible nuisance was the being obliged to be prepared with money made up in small paper parcels, to pay off the different sets of bearers when they carried us the stipulated distance, and handed us over to a fresh set. At all hours of the night we were liable to be awakened for this; and then the half-sleepy cutwall, or native magistrate, oftentimes more knave than fool, would persist in maintaining that the money was short of an anna or two, though every separate parcel, with the name of the stage marked upon it, had been counted and sealed up by the collector of Tellicherry himself.

There was something quite unearthly and appalling in the noise our bearers made when passing through the densest parts of the jungle during the night. In lieu of each palanquin being supplied with two massalgees, or link-bearers, every man that was not actually carrying the palanquins armed himself with a huge torch, and amidst the