Note return — COLONEL DAVIDSON'S TRAVELS IN INDIA.5

Dhacca was a place abounding in strange characters from all parts of the world; and among others whom the colonel encountered, was a singular specimen of a cosmopolite, a native of Fez, who called himself a Moslem, but whom our friend vehemently suspected of being a Jew. He had been almost as great a traveller as his countryman the famous Sheikh Ebn Batuta, whose wanderings are immortalized in the pages of Maga,10 and came last from Moulmein, with a cargo of black pepper and rubies. He had resided seventeen years in India, and proposed to the colonel, whom he claimed as a brother, "since from his own home he could reach England in ten days," that they should jointly freight a vessel with valuables, and go home together! And, among other scattered facts, a casual encounter with some Chinese in the employ of the Assam Tea Company, whom the colonel considerably astonished by addressing them in their own language, introduces "the very curious fact," that at Tipperah, a civil station not more than fifty or sixty miles from Dhacca, the natives have from time immemorial used the tea which grows there abundantly, and is prepared after a fashion of their own. "And yet" (continues the colonel—and we fear there is too much truth in his remarks) "the existence of the tea-plant is but a recent discovery! Any other nation would have established a tea-manufactory at Tipperah, immediately after the first settlement, and the Yankees would have 'progressed' railroads and steam-boats for its success. India is at this moment a mine of unexplored wealth. No sooner had steam-boats appeared than coal has been discovered in every direction!" The manufacture of native iron in Bengal, which had been pressed upon Lord Hastings, as the colonel seems to imply, by himself, and at first warmly adopted by him, was objected to in the council, and ultimately abandoned, "on the grounds that it would militate against the commercial interests of Great Britain—that is, against the profits of those India stockholders, possessing votes, who followed the trade of ironmongers!" There is many a true word spoken in jest; and this and other side-cuts of the colonel at the shortsighted proceedings of the Bahadurs at Calcutta, though sometimes queerly worded, contain now and then some unpalatable facts. The administration of the present Governor-General has shown at least some promise of a better state of things—and if the impulse now given to the development of the resources of India be steadily followed up, this reproach will erelong be taken away. The receipt of his final orders, however, which pointed out China as his destination, put an end to the colonel's speculations; and re-embarking on the stream of the Booree Gunga, he passed, with little incident worth noticing, through the numerous branches of the river, and the picturesque jungles of the Soonderbunds, and arrived safely, after an absence of twenty-one years, at the city of palaces—and there we leave him.