Page:Letters from India Vol 2.pdf/38

 have only nothing apiece to give away in matter of news, it would be better to give it in large handfuls than in small quantities.

We are doing our hot month of May with considerable suffering, but certainly with less than last year. We manage the shutting up of the house better and keep ourselves quieter, and we allege all these kind of reasons, but the real truth is, I suppose, that we are becoming acclimatised more or less—rather less than more, but still we are becoming blind to our wretched position.

I never eat any fruit but mangoes, though I see all the others working away at the peaches (which used to make us die of laughing last year) and declaring that it is wonderful how the Indian peaches are come on. It is only the English peaches that have gone back; these are about the size of the first small ones that the frost nips off, rather more shrivelled and with not so much taste. We have also discovered that the white, tasteless asparagus is ‘really not amiss,’ much more like English asparagus than it was last year.

We have been revelling in that heap of books that has at last wrung from the hard hands