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70 telling them to 'gather' in imagination round his chair, and hear his words. To one he writes that he used to be 'quite overcome by her clinging affection while she was with him, and that her wailing on his departure still rings in his ears.' He is, in the first instance, cheered by the society of his two sisters-in-law. But he says that by his bereavement 'the home has been shattered — never to be set up again in its integrity;' and in one sense this prediction proves true. His household will be stately and well ordered, but will never know any mistress until his daughters shall have grown up in England and come to join him in India.

Starting from Bombay with his late wife's two sisters as already mentioned, he travels by palanquin at the rate of thirty miles a day to Allahábád, some 600 miles distant. The party start in the lightest marching order as regards luggage, still they require upwards of seventy men to be collected at intervals of twenty miles all the way, including torch-bearers for the nocturnal journey. This wearisome travel leads him over the bold and rugged scenery of the Western Ghát mountains, across the cotton-fields of Berar and Nágpur, through the forests of the Sátpura range, across the Narbadá to Jabalpur, and on to Allahábád, where he is received by his sister Frances, and his brother-in-law Montgomery.

Returning to Agra early in 1840, he reverts to his appointment as Secretary to the Government of the North-Western Provinces. He takes a house of which