Such gigantic trees I never saw.

In a quarter of an hour I passed hundreds the smallest of which would bear a comparison with any of those oaks which are shown as prodigious in England.

The grass, the weeds, and the wild flowers grew as high as my head.

The sun, almost a stranger to me, was now shining brightly; and, when late in the afternoon I again got out of my palanquin and looked back, I saw the large mountain ridge from which I had descended twenty miles behind me, still buried in the same mass of fog and rain in which I had been living for weeks.
"On Tuesday, the 16th" (of September), "I went on board at Madras.

I amused myself on the voyage to Calcutta with learning Portuguese, and made myself almost as well acquainted with it as I care to be.