And now think calmly over what I have written.  I would not have written on the subject even to you, till the matter was quite settled, if I had not thought that you ought to have full time to make up your mind.  If you feel an insurmountable aversion to India, I will do all in my power to make your residence in England comfortable during my absence, and to enable you to confer instead of receiving benefits.  But if my dear sister would consent to give me, at this great crisis of my life, that proof, that painful and arduous proof, of her affection, which I beg of her, I think that she will not repent of it.  She shall not, if the unbounded confidence and attachment of one to whom she is dearer than life can compensate her for a few years’ absence from much that she loves.

Dear Margaret!  She will feel this.  Consult her, my love, and let us both have the advantage of such advice as her excellent understanding, and her warm affection for us, may furnish.  On Monday next, at the latest, I expect to be with you.  Our Scotch tour, under these circumstances, must be short.  By Christmas it will be fit that the new Councillor should leave England.  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.  A girl who had seen no country more foreign than Wales, and crossed no water broader and more tempestuous than the Mersey, looked forward to a voyage which (as she subsequently learned by melancholy experience), might extend over six weary months, with an anxiety that can hardly be imagined by us who spend only half as many weeks on the journey between Dover and Bombay.  A separation from beloved relations under such conditions was a separation indeed; and, if Macaulay and his sister could have foreseen how much of what they left at their departure they would fail to find on their return, it is a question whether any earthly consideration could have induced them to quit their native shore.  But Hannah’s sense of duty was too strong for these doubts and tremors; and, happily, (for on the whole her resolution was a fortunate one,) she resolved to accompany her brother in an expatriation which he