“The manner in which the intelligence of my being wounded reached your beloved mother was peculiarly trying to her affectionate heart. That excellent and amiable character, the Earl of Dartmouth, then Lord Lewisham, was at Malta when I was landed there. He paid me frequent visits; and particularly on the eve of his departure for England, that he might carry the latest intelligence respecting me. Upon his arrival, he hastened to Bath, that he might be himself the bearer of what he considered the most favourable accounts. He accordingly called upon your dear mother, and concluding that she must long have been in possession of the news of the action, proceeded to tell her that my wound was doing well. This was the first intimation she had received of the event, and it was too much for her agitated feelings. She fainted, and Lord Lewisham was in the greatest distress, at having been the innocent cause of her suffering. Her peculiar strength of mind however soon enabled her to depend upon that power for support which had never deserted her. Lord Lewisham knowing I had written by the same ship in which he had been a passenger, flew to the post office, and did not quit it, till the expected letter was put into his hands, and ran with the utmost eagerness to deliver it. I had taken the precaution of sending home a minute surgical description of the wound, which being shewn to a medical friend at Bath, he pronounced to my dear suffering companion that the wound was not a dangerous one. This tranquillized her, and enabled her to look forward with hope to the period of our meeting. At the latter end of the month my letter from Gibraltar arrived with further encouraging accounts. Your mother with her three darlings flew to Portsmouth, and extraordinary as it may appear, almost at the same moment that she alighted at the inn, I anchored at the Motherbank. As she travelled from Southampton to Portsmouth, the Spartan was running through the Needles, and must have been an attractive object to the dear travellers, who little thought we were so near each other. It is customary for ships from the Mediterranean to be kept in quarantine till the return of the post, which communicates their arrival; but the Lords of the Admiralty in kind consideration of my state, ordered the ship to be released by telegraph, and I landed the following morning, experiencing in the meeting with all I held dearest to me in the world, sensations of delight which amply repaid me for all the sufferings and fatigue, both of body and mind, to which I had been exposed since my separation from them. It is scarcely possible for me to look back upon this period, which was one of pure, and almost unmixed felicity. Of pain I was no longer sensible, acute as it had been during the passage. My sufferings had indeed been so great till this period, that the latter hours of the day were passed in looking at the movements of my watch, impatiently waiting for the appointed hour,