The clocks of the city have struck two. Where can a man get food? Calcutta is not rich in respect of dainty accommodation. You can stay your stomach at Peliti’s or Bonsard’s, but their shops are not to be found in Hasting Street, or in the places where brokers¹ fly to and fro in office-jauns, sweating and growing visibly rich. There must be some sort of entertainment where sailors congregate². “Honest Bombay Jack³” supplies nothing but Burma cheroots and whisky in liqueur-glasses, but in Lal Bazar, not far from “The Sailors’ Coffee-rooms,” a board gives bold advertisement that “officers and seamen⁴ can find good quarters.” In evidence a row of neat officers and seamen are sitting on a bench by the “hotel” door smoking. There is an almost military likeness⁵ in their clothes. Perhaps “Honest Bombay Jack” only keeps one kind of felt hat and one brand of suit. When Jack of the mercantile marine⁶ is sober, he is very sober. When he is drunk he is—but ask the river police what a lean, mad Yankee can do with his nails and teeth. These gentlemen smoking on the bench are impassive almost as Red Indians. Their attitudes are unrestrained, and they do not wear braces⁷. Nor, it would appear from the bill of fare, are they particular as to what they eat when they attend tâble d’hôte. The fare is substantial and the regulation peg⁸—every house has its own depth of peg if you will refrain from stopping Ganymede—something to wonder at. Three fingers and a trifle over seems to be the use of the officers and seamen who are talking so quietly in the doorway⁹. One says—he has evidently finished a long story—“and so he shipped for four pound ten with a first mate’s certificate and all, and that was in a German barque.” Another spits with conviction and says

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