Page:Letters from India Vol 2.pdf/122

 so unnatural! so unlike you that I can’t understand it! You are either travelling in foreign parts, or having five or six more cowslips planted round that border. You are capable of either the one thing or the other. It’s no merit of yours, and I am not the very least obliged to you, because you meant me to have none; but I have got a letter from you this very week, finished off June 19, 1837; and, what shows the merit of the letter, it reads just as well now as if you had written it yesterday. And it was three months coming from Calcutta on the head of a coolie.

The weather is perfectly beautiful just now, and the snowy mountains have walked quite near this year; some ignorant people say it is an optical delusion, caused by the clearness of the atmosphere, but I know better than to be taken in by them. I certainly love those hills—positively love them—and I do not positively love anything else in India; but, now we are here a second year, I feel like a daughter of the soil, a son of the clime, a nephew and a niece even.

I give up ten minutes every day to think how we ought be at Calcutta and how we are