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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IX. INDIA CONCLUDED.?BOMBAY. The most remarkable feature to the stranger in Bombay, the caves of Elephanta always excepted, is the portable houses and gardens which he will be sure to find, apparently fixtures, on the esplanade at Bombay, but which as surely and unexpectedly vanish so soon as the monsoons give ominous evidence of their near approach, and when the sudden arrival of a hurricane would indeed be devastating in its results. Here we are, for instance, taking our evening walk on the esplanade, listening to the pleasant music of a military band, which plays here pro bonopublico every other evening, so long as his excellency the governor remains at Bombay. All the fashionable world, including strangers, are here to be met with inhaling with gusto the cool evening breeze, for the esplanade runs parallel with the sea-side, and exchanging scraps of news which have most likely been brought by private letters from all parts of India, and for that matter Europe also, by the identical steamer that has brought us so far. On one side of us are a long row of very neat houses surrounded by high wooden palings, which apparently enclose gardens of fruit-trees and flowers. On entering one of the houses the delusion is still kept up, for we pass up an avenue formed by palings, so tall that we can only see thetops of orange-trees and the larger species of plants. The house itself is precisely what any other brick-built house in India would be, the front and back verandahs included, and is painted to imitate one exactly. There is a large cool hall and a fine sitting-room, all elegantly furnished, and a long. suite of bed-rooms and dressing-rooms; for, with oriental hospitality, every house is constructed so as to admit of the host lodging a guest or two; and it is seldom t...