On the 30th May we reached Portsmouth, and landed between two showers of snow!  I had a final parade of the men before leaving the ship, and I was quite sorry to say good-bye to them; some of the poor fellows were already beginning to be anxious about their future, and to regret that their time with the colours was over.

My father, mother, and sister came up to London to meet us, very little changed since I had left them six years before.  I remained in England till March, 1866, when I returned to India, leaving my wife behind to follow in the autumn.

While I was at home, Sir Hugh Rose’s term of the chief command in India came to an end, and his place had been taken by Sir William Mansfield.  On my arrival in Calcutta, I received orders to join the Allahabad division, and thither I proceeded.  In October I went to Calcutta to meet my wife and take her to Allahabad, where we remained for nearly a year, her first experience of a hot season in the plains, and a very bad one it was.  Cholera was rife; the troops had to be sent away into camps, more or less distant from the station, all of which had to be visited once, if not twice, daily; this kept me pretty well on the move from morning till night.  It was a sad time for everyone.  People we had seen alive and well one day were dead and buried the next; and in the midst of all this sorrow and tragedy the most irksome—­because such an incongruous—­part of our experience was that we had constantly to get up entertainments, penny readings, and the like, to amuse the men and keep their minds occupied, for if once soldiers begin to think of the terrors of cholera they are seized with panic, and many get the disease from pure fright.

My wife usually accompanied me to the cholera camps, preferring to do this rather than be left alone at home.  On one occasion, I had just got into our carriage after going round the hospital, when a young officer ran after us to tell me a corporal in whom I had been much interested was dead.  The poor fellow’s face was blue; the cholera panic had evidently seized him, and I said to my wife, ’He will be the next.’  I had no sooner reached home than I received a report of his having been seized.

We were fortunate in having at Allahabad as Chaplain the present Bishop of Lahore, who, with his wife, had only lately come to India; they never wearied in doing all that was possible for the soldiers.  Bishop Matthew is still one of our closest friends; his good, charming and accomplished wife, alas! died some years ago.

We remained at Allahabad until August, 1867, when we heard that a brigade from Bengal was likely to be required to take part in an expedition which would probably be sent from Bombay to Abyssinia for the relief of some Europeans whom the King, Theodore, had imprisoned, and that the Mountain battery, on the strength of which my name was still borne, would in such case be employed.  I therefore thought I had