CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
before night they make friendly visits to one another, when pride or contention do not spoil society as too often they do among the ladies, as discord and faction do among the men."
Elsewhere the worthy captain records: "The Company has also a pretty good garden that furnishes the Governor's table with herbage and fruits, and some fish-ponds to serve his kitchen with good carp, calkops and mullet. Most of the inhabitants of Calcutta that make any tolerable figure have the same advantages; and all sorts of provisions, both wild and tame, being plentiful, good, and cheap, as well as clothing, make the country very agreeable, notwithstanding the above-mentioned inconveniences that attend it."
Chief of these "inconveniences" appears to have been the unhealthiness of the situation of Calcutta, lying as it did between the river and a great salt-water lake.
"This overflows," says Hamilton, "in September and October, and then prodigious numbers of fish resort thither; but in November and December, when the floods are dissipated, those fishes are left dry, and with their putrefaction so affect the air with thick stinking vapours which the north-east winds bring with them to Fort William that they cause a yearly mortality. One year I was there, and there were reckoned in
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