He used to spend a part of his vacation in each year at the house of a friend at Chelsea, before returning to his home at Clifton. Having passed through College he spent four months in England, in order to have the companionship of Henry on the voyage out to India. He sailed in September 1829, being nineteen years old, in a vessel bound for Calcutta by the route round the Cape of Good Hope. At a later stage in his life, some analysis will be given to show how far he partook of the several elements in our composite national character, English, Scotch and Irish. It may suffice here to state that for all these years his nurture, bringing up, and education generally, had been English, with the important exception of the two years which he spent at Londonderry. Whatever Scotch or Irish proclivities he may have possessed, and they will be considered hereafter, no son of England, of his age, ever left her shores more imbued than he with her ideas, more loyal to her principles, more cognisant of her strength or weakness, of her safety or danger, of her virtues or failings. CHAPTER III THE DELHI TERRITORY 1829-1846 John Lawrence, in company with his elder brother Henry, entered in 1829 upon his new life, beginning with a five months’ voyage through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. On this voyage he suffered severely from sea-sickness, and the suffering was protracted over several weeks. This must have aggravated any constitutional tendency to nervous irritability in his head. He landed at Calcutta in February, 1830, just when the cool season was over and the weather was growing warmer and warmer till it attained the heat of early summer. Then he passed through the rainy period of midsummer, which in those latitudes always had a depressing effect on him as on many others. He was an ordinarily good student in the College of Fort William--the official name whereby the stronghold of Calcutta is called. He mixed but little in the society of the capital, and pined for his English home, fancying that poverty there would be better than affluence in the East; he even allowed himself to be dominated by this sort of home-sickness, for the first and last time in his life. However, after sojourning for a few months in Calcutta, and passing the examination in the vernacular of Upper India, he asked for and obtained an appointment at Delhi, partly because his brother Henry was serving in the Artillery at Kurnal in that neighbourhood, partly also because the far-off frontier had a fascination for him as for many others. In those days a journey from Calcutta to Delhi (now accomplished by railway within three days) often occupied nearly three months by boat on the Ganges; but by travelling in a palanquin he traversed the distance, about eleven hundred miles, within three weeks.