CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
often, without undergoing the ceremony of a formal introduction, receive matrimonial overtures."
This picture is, no doubt, slightly overdrawn, but it is easy to see how such a custom must have arisen when we remember that that "model of genteel conveyance," the palanquin, conveyed only a single person, and the lady's natural escort could not be in attendance to assist her to, not alight, but rise from her conveyance when it had been deposited on the ground.
The palanquin of old times was very different from the ugly boxlike modern palkee. Surgeon Ives described it as "a covered machine with cushions in it, arched in the middle to give more room and air, and carried on the shoulders of four or six men." Tavernier, the enterprising and observant merchant-traveller of the seventeenth century, gave a more interesting and minute description of the genuine Indian palanquin, which, with possibly slight alterations, was the same as that used by the English.
"The pallankeen" wrote the Frenchman, " is a kind of bed of six or seven feet long, and three feet wide, with a small rail all round. A sort of cane, called bamboo, which they bend when young in order to cause it to take the form of a bow, in the middle sustains the cover of the
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