His functions in India commence next April.

We shall leave our dear Margaret, I hope, a happy mother.
Farewell, my dear sister.

You cannot tell how impatiently I shall wait for your answer.
T.B.M.
This letter, written under the influence of deep and varied emotions, was read with feelings of painful agitation and surprise.

India was not then the familiar name that it has become to a generation which regards a visit to Cashmere as a trip to be undertaken between two London seasons, and which discusses over its breakfast table at home the decisions arrived at on the previous afternoon in the Council-room of Simla or Calcutta.

In those rural parsonages and middle-class households where service in our Eastern territories now presents itself in the light of a probable and desirable destiny for a promising son, those same territories were forty years ago regarded as an obscure and distant region of disease and death.