I cannot tell you what a comfort it is to me to find that I shall be able to do this.

It reconciles me to all the pains--acute enough, sometimes, God knows,--of banishment.

In a few years, if I live--probably in less than five years from the time at which you will be reading this letter--we shall be again together in a comfortable, though a modest, home; certain of a good fire, a good joint of meat, and a good glass of wine; without owing obligations to anybody; and perfectly indifferent, at least as far as our pecuniary interest is concerned, to the changes of the political world.

Rely on it, my dear girls, that there is no chance of my going back with my heart cooled towards you.

I came hither principally to save my family, and I am not likely while here to forget them.
Ever yours T.B.M.
The months of July and August Macaulay spent on the Neilgherries, in a climate equable as Madeira and invigorating as Braemar; where thickets of rhododendron fill the glades and clothe the ridges; and where the air is heavy with the scent of rose-trees of a size more fitted for an orchard than a flower-bed, and bushes of heliotrope thirty paces round.
The glories of the forests and of the gardens touched him in spite of his profound botanical ignorance, and he dilates more than once upon his "cottage buried in laburnums, or something very like them, and geraniums which grow in the open air." He had the more leisure for the natural beauties of the place, as there was not much else to interest even a traveller fresh from England.
"I have as yet seen little of the idolatry of India; and that little, though excessively absurd, is not characterised by atrocity or indecency.