Old Diary Leaves - v. 3 Author:Henry Steel Olcott 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 II. AN ADEPT SEEN AT PONDICHERY CAN any of H. P. E.'s old friends figure to themselves how she must have looked and felt on being received at a railw... more »ay station by a Governor's band playing " God Save the Queen," and then taken in procession, to the clang of music, to our lodging-house ? That is just what happened to us on reaching Pondiche'ry, and I draw the veil over the amusing picture, as I have not the talent of Bret Harte to do it justice. At the house, in the presence of a select number of dark-skinned French "citizens," an address in a rickety sort of French was read to us and duly responded to by me ; after which presentations, welcomes, and compliments followed, and our rooms were thronged by visitors day and evening. The next morning I had ceremonial visits to make to His Excellency the Governor, His something the Mayor, and various other local officials, by all of whom I was courteously and kindly received. Then I had a look through the town, upon which the French cachet was placed wherever possible—the blue-and-white enamelledstreet signs at the corners, the little side-walk tables and chairs at restaurants, the Paris names and shops in petto, the French look of the Place Dupleix, the unmistakable French look of the functionaries and white traders, the very aping of French manners by the Natives. This little seven-by-nine colony, comparatively to British India as big as a postage stamp, and hemmed in by it on the three land sides, was totally unlike it, even in the attitude of the white and dark races towards each other. That, indeed, was what struck me most forcibly, accustomed as I had become to the immense gulf between the races in the Great British Dependency. My introducer to all these high officials was a dark, almost black, Tamil gentleman, a Membre ...« less