No one can conceive what has become of all the ships that usually touch here about this time. I was promised my choice of Green’s and Smith’s, and now only the heavy old _Camperdown_ is expected with rice from Moulmein. A lady now here, who has been Heaven only knows _where not_, praises Alexandria above all other places, after Suez. Her lungs are bad, and she swears by Suez, which she says is the dreariest and healthiest (for lungs) place in the world. You can’t think how soon one learns to ‘annihilate space’, if not time, in one’s thoughts, by daily reading advertisements for every port in India, America, Australia, &c., &c., and conversing with people who have just come from the ‘ends of the earth’. Meanwhile, I fear I shall have to fly from next winter again, and certainly will go with J— to Egypt, which seems to me like next door. I have run on, and not thanked you for your letter and M. Mignet’s beautiful _éloge_ of Mr. Hallam, which pleased me greatly. I wish Englishmen could learn to speak with the same good taste and _mésure_. Mr. Wodehouse, who has been very civil to me, kindly tried to get me a passage home in a French frigate lying here, but in vain. I am now sorry I let the Jack tars here persuade me not to go in the little barque; but they talked so much of the heat and damp of such tiny cabins in an iron vessel, that I gave her up, though I liked the idea of a good tossing in such a tiny cockboat. I will leave a letter for the May mail, unless I sail within a week of to-morrow, or go by the _Jason_, which would be home far sooner than the mail. I only hope you and A— won’t be uneasy; the worst that can happen is delay, and the long voyage will be all gain to health, which would not be the case in a steamer. All I hear of R— makes me wild to see her again. The little darkies are the only pleasing children here, and a fat black toddling thing is ‘allerliebst’. I know a boy of four, literally jet black, whom I long to steal as he follows his mother up to the mountain to wash. Little Malays are lovely, but _too_ well-behaved and quiet. I tried to get a real ‘_tottie_’, or ‘Hotentotje’, but the people were too drunk to remember where they had left their child. _C’est assez dire_, that I should have had no scruple in buying it for a bottle of ‘smoke’ (the spirit made from grape husks). They are clever and affectionate when they have a chance, poor things,—and so strange to look at.