very large street remarkable for the superior style of its buildings and the sober industry of its inhabitants.  The masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths of this little colony were working in our camp every day, while we remained in the vicinity, and better workmen I have never seen in India; but they would all insist upon going to divine service at the prescribed hours.  They had built a splendid pucka[13] dwelling-house for their bishop, and a still more splendid church, and formed for him the finest garden I have seen in India, surrounded with a good wall, and provided with admirable pucka wells.  The native Christian servants who attended at the old bishop’s table, taught by himself, spoke Latin to him; but he was become very feeble, and spoke himself a mixture of Latin, Italian, his native tongue, and Hindustani.  We used to have him at our messes, and take as much care of him as of an infant, for he was become almost as frail as one.  The joy and the excitement of being once more among Europeans, and treated by them with so much reverence in the midst of his flock, were perhaps too much for him, for he sickened and died soon after.

The Raja died soon after him, and in all probability the flock has disappeared.  No Europeans except a few indigo planters of the neighbourhood had ever before known or heard of this colony; and they seemed to consider them only as a set of great scoundrels, who had better carts and bullocks than anybody else in the country, which they refused to let out at the same rate as the others, and which they (the indigo lords) were not permitted to seize and employ at discretion.  Roman Catholics have a greater facility in making converts in India than Protestants, from having so much more in their form of worship to win the affections through the medium of the imagination.[14]

Notes: 

1.  Men are occasionally exempted from the necessity of becoming a Brahman first.  Men of low caste, if they die at particular places, where it is the interest of the Brahmans to invite rich men to die, are promised absorption into the great ‘Brahma’ at once.  Immense numbers of wealthy men go every year from the most distant parts of India to die at Benares, where they spend large sums of money among the Brahmans.  It is by their means that this, the second city in India, is supported. [W.  H. S.] Bombay is now the second city in India, so far as population is concerned.

2.  Brahma, with the short vowel, is the eternal Essence or Spirit; Brahma, with the long vowel, is ’the primaeval male god, the first personal product of the purely spiritual Brahma, when overspread by Maya, or illusory creative force’, according to the Vedanta system (Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p. 44).

3.  Indra was originally, in the Vedas, the Rain-god.  The statement in the text refers to modern Hinduism.