Photo, by H. R. Sherborn, Newmarket. 



CHAPTER XII. 



Return to India — Starting a Newspaper — Society in India — The Counter 

 Test — Planters — Life in Calcutta — Public Opinion in India — Indian 

 Officials — Amateur Actors— Miss Amy Sherwin — Mr Rudyard Kipling 

 as a Flatterer. 



WHEN we got tired of buying curios and studying 

 Japanese life, we asked ourselves the important 

 question : ' What next ? ' I was for going to California or 

 Australia ; but my wife, like all ladies who have ever been 

 to India, longed to return to the country of mangos, curry, 

 ' bow-wows,' ride-where-you-like-and-no-law-of-trespass, su- 

 premacy of women, and kala jugaJis, declared for Calcutta. 

 She, knowing my love for new sensations, represented that 

 I had never run a newspaper, and that there was room for 

 a smart one, on sporting lines, in the City of Palaces. The 

 novelty of the idea charmed me, especially as I knew that 

 in India I had, for my books, a large reading public, many 



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