After a short stay in Calcutta, we set out for Benares. The journey was performed in a new fashion. We purchased a conveyance, and arranged to have it drawn by relays of coolies all the way. Arrangements were made by an agent in Calcutta to have word sent on in advance, so that at every sixth or eighth mile coolies might be in readiness for us. Before 1839 the great Trunk Road from Calcutta to Delhi had been made, but the streams and ravines were for the most part unbridged, and consequently travelling by a wheeled conveyance was very slow and difficult. By 1854 the road had been greatly improved, many bridges had been made, and thus the facilities for travelling were much increased. At every twelve or fourteen miles there were rest-houses for European travellers, called "staging bungalows," all built on the same plan at the expense of two wealthy natives, each with two rooms and a bath-room attached, a bedstead in each room, a table, and two or three chairs, with a man in charge to take a small sum from each traveller for accommodation, and ready to furnish him with a good Indian meal at a very moderate rate. At some of these we stopped for rest and food. Our party consisted of our family, and a lady friend who wished to travel with us. Desirous to get on quickly, we were sometimes in our conveyance twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and dosed as we proceeded the best way we could. We met with no adventure worth relating, and were glad after ten days' journeying to find ourselves once more in our old dear abode. We had a most hearty and gratifying welcome from our brethren, both European and native. We reached it on a Saturday. I told the brethren that after my long absence, and entire disuse of the native language during that period, I must be a hearer the next day. They said that could not be, as the people were expecting me to officiate. Thus urged I ventured to conduct the service, and I was agreeably surprised to find that old scenes seemed to revive my knowledge of the language, and to bear me through with unexpected ease. We resumed work at Benares recruited in health, and refreshed in spirit, and prepared by the experience of previous years to prosecute it with new effectiveness. We had a sense of the difficulties of the work, its trials and discouragements, and of the absolute necessity of Divine help in order to its being rightly prosecuted, which we could not have had at an earlier period; and we had at the same time a deeper realization of its greatness, blessedness, and final certain triumph. The missionary has little of the spirit of his office, and little fitness for it, who at every successive stage of his course is not increasingly bent on honouring his Master and promoting the good of the people among whom he labours, and who is not at the same time increasingly thankful for having been called to so high an office, while deeply humbled at his own unworthiness and his many shortcomings.