Having returned to Titalya, Mr. Hodgson and I set off in an eastern direction for the Teesta river, whose embouchure from the mountains to the plains I was anxious to visit. Though the weather is hot, and oppressively so in the middle of the day, there are few climates more delicious than that of these grassy savannahs from December to March. We always started soon after daybreak on ponies, and enjoyed a twelve to sixteen miles’ gallop in the cool of the morning before breakfast, which we found prepared on our arrival at a tent sent on ahead the night before. The road led across an open country, or followed paths through interminable rice-fields, now dry and dusty. On poor soil a white-flowered _Leucas_ monopolized the space, like our charlock and poppy: it was apparently a pest to the agriculturist, covering the surface in some places like a sprinkling of snow. Sometimes the river-beds exposed fourteen feet of pure stratified sand, with only an inch of vegetable soil above. At this season the mornings are very hazy, with the thermometer at sunrise 60°; one laid on grass during the night falling 7° below that temperature: dew forms, but never copiously: by 10 a.m. the temperature has risen to 75°, and the faint easterly morning breezes die away; the haze thickens, and covers the sky with a white veil, the thermometer rising to 82° at noon, and the west wind succeeding in parching tornados and furious gusts, increasing with the temperature, which attains its maximum in the afternoon, and falling again with its decline at sunset. The evenings are calm; but the earth is so heated, that the thermometer stands at 10 p.m. at 66°, and the minimum at night is not below 55°: great drought accompanies the heat at this season, but not to such a degree as in North-west India, or other parts of this meridian further removed from the hills. In the month of March, and during the prevalence of west winds, the mean temperature was 79°, and the dew-point 22° lower, indicating great drought. The temperature at Calcutta was 7° warmer, and the atmosphere very much damper.