.

To finish the portrait of Maha Raja Sarbojee, I should tell you that he is a strong-built and very handsome middle-aged man, with eyes and nose like a fine hawk, and very bushy grey mustachios, generally splendidly dressed, but with no effeminacy of ornament, and looking and talking more like a favourable specimen of a French general officer than any other object of comparison which occurs to me.

His son, Raja Seroojee (so named after their great ancestor), is a pale, sickly-looking lad of seventeen, who also speaks English, but imperfectly, and on whose account his father lamented, with much apparent concern, the impossibility which he found of obtaining any tolerable instruction in Tanjore.

I was moved at this, and offered to take him on my tour, and afterwards to Calcutta, where he might have apartments in my house, and be introduced into good English society; at the same time that I would superintend his studies, and procure for him the best masters which India affords.

The father and son, in different ways,--the one catching at the idea with great eagerness, the other as if he were afraid to say all he wished,--seemed both well pleased with the proposal.