Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/63

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IN INDIA.
43

all it knew) of some old Scottish song. I have seen the eye of the veteran as he lay at anchor on the shores of the Irrawaddy, fill with tears of ecstacy, on listening to a once familiar tune, played by one he knew not, in a boat floating down the stream. I have seen the son of the mountain and the flood, burst into a transport of joy on espying the snowy peaks of the Himmalayah after long years of residence in the plains, and hail them as the friends of his boyhood. Such concentrated essences of enjoyment are worth years of the maudlin sentimentality that often creeps through the sensorium of the stay-at-home, and no sweeter incense is offered on the altar of patriotism, than by the exiled wanderer in a tropic land.

9. VOYAGE BY THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.—A fine ship, a first class Indiaman of 1500 tons, is by no means so cribbed and confined a place as the uninitiated would suppose, nor is the voyage round the Cape so very monotonous. One's ideas become wonderfully accommodated to peculiar circumstances; he who on shore would not be satisfied without two good airy rooms, would, on board ship, think himself well off with a cabinnine feet square and high enough to stand in with his hat off. Streets of cabins,below and above, are inhabited by an extensive society of beauty and fashion;the cuddy table is the place of rendezvous three or four times a day,in good fellowship and