After a night and greater part of two days passed in a species of oven called a French Diligence, with Réaumur Thermometer at 23--hotter, you will observe, than is necessary to hatch silkworms, and very nearly sufficient to annihilate your unfortunate brother and husband--did we arrive at Bruxelles.... I must give you a few details that you may fully understand the extent of our misery. We arrived at Liège all well, with only two other passengers; conceive our sorrow when on re-entering the Diligence after dinner we found besides ourselves and a lady the places occupied by a Dutch officer, who sat gasping without his coat, and so far exhausted by the heat, though he had been ten years in Batavia, that his pipe hung dangling as if he had not breath sufficient to keep its vestal fire alive, and a lady with two children besides living intruders. A net from the top was filled with bags, baskets, and band-boxes. Our night was sad indeed, and the groans of our fellow-travellers and the ineffectual fluttering of a fan which the Officer used proved how little they were satisfied with the order of things. The children were crammed with a succession of French Plums, almonds, garlicked mutton, liqueurs, and hock, all of which ingredients the kind mother endeavoured to cement on their Stomachs by Basons of milk at sunrise, but no sooner had a few additional jolts brought these bons-bons into close contact than the windows were occupied the rest of the journey by the stretched-out heads of the poor children. The heat has been more excessive for the last 4 or 5 days than has been experienced for many years in this country; and, in short, when _I_ think it worth while to mention heat as the cause of real inconvenience, you may consider it such as would have thrown you into a fever. Enough of our personal sufferings, which you may easily conceive have been few indeed if the above is worth recording....