BOMBAY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LI, Issue 5604, 10 February 1879, Page 7

BOMBAY.

A correspondent, writing to the Melbourne Argus concerning Bombay, says t—- “ Two sights of Bombay•. are its market—the finest that the world can show—and the walled enclosure in which the dhobioe, or washing men, work —to the number of 800 at least,. The market is adaptedioraUststes of the weather, and, as anaajunot,ha* a fine garden with good seats and a,pretty central fountain. Each of the dbobios work* at a small stone tank, in which the linen i# soaked. Afterwards it is taken out and slapped about Oh a square stone until all the buttons are pretty well broken or knocked off. y It is then dried and.; ironed after,' a fashion that makes it look yellowish and unpleasant, The Chinaman understands washing, and does it well; hut the Hindoo is a sad failure, at it. Bombay is becoming a second Alexandria, as that city once was. The civilisation of the East and the West here meet and ! fermerit., Other cities. of India are dead alive compared to it. They show what India was* and j one sees here what it is. TherS yiS hqtl here that darkly-shaded Bembrandt-liko picture that Benhes shows, nor that Paul Veronese splendour that is semi at Lucknow. i There are here no fairy-like bubble* of marble i floating in the air as at Agra, nor any pelace*; of alabaster inlaid with jewels and minors as ! at Delhi, but there is instead buty life and vitality in everything, and samples to.ha seen < of all the large packages of Hindoo life that the traveller sees fully opened out elsewhere.; Here are Hindoo temples with ever clanging bellsj Moslem mosques that seem never without devotees; Parseo templesforthose worshippers of fire whom one sees in the i evening. bowing their heads to the setting! sun, the most practically powerful of aUIndian deities —a sun, too, that is seen l in greater glory than the eyes of the western world ever see it. A Jewish synagogue is) here,' too, and the chapel of the Soman Catholic, side by side with the church of thei Protestant. Near at hand,* the cemetery of both Protestant, and Catholic jostle that of the Mahomedan ; and the ground on which the Hindoo burns his dead is withiuisight of that in which the Paraee gives-his to the birds of the air.