EMMA LAZARUS.
EARLY TRAVELING EXPERIENCES IN INDIA.
In August, 1849, when I had been living at Calcutta nearly three
years, I was warned by my doctor that I must go on a sea-voyage or
else to the Himalaya Mountains, if life was an object with me. Such it
was, and very keenly. The four-and-twenty years of it which I had
divided between study and rollicking had approved themselves, like
this poor old world when it was new, "very good," and I had a strong
objection to parting with it on so short an acquaintance. True, my
hepatic apparatus, as the doctors grandly call the liver, had got
miserably out of gear, though I was a water-drinker, and though I had
a wholesome horror of tropical sunshine. But I had a good
constitution, and I had the word of the medical faculty for it that
many a man with not half so good a one as mine had pulled through a
much worse condition than I was in. To go away somewhere, however, was
proposed as my only alternative to migrating down to the hideous
cemetery among the bogs and jackals of Chowringhee. But where should I
go? After having been shot once and drowned twice when a boy, I had
been ship-wrecked at the mouth of the sacred and accursed Ganges, and
had just escaped with my life and Greek lexicon. Shooting--and I may
throw in hanging--I felt proof against, and as for drowning, I had no
fear of that.
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