arduous efforts, privations, anxieties, and fatigue. Repairing on board the _Benares_ to learn the news, the captain informed him that, in consequence of being found in a defective state on her arrival at Bombay, 'the _Enterprise_ was not coming at all.' This intelligence seems to have felled him like a blow, and he was immediately seized with a delirious fever. The captain and officers of the _Benares_ felt great sympathy and interest in this sad result of so many extraordinary efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed every attention on his malady." It was six weeks before he could proceed by sailing vessel to Bombay, where he arrived on the 21st March, having, in spite of all the drawbacks in his way, accomplished the journey in four months and twenty-one days--quite an extraordinary rapidity at that time. Had he escaped the fever at Juddah, and fallen in with the _Enterprise_ at the right time, nearly two months might have been saved. He had proved the practicability of the overland route, and he now devoted himself to its establishment. In an address to the Home Government and the East India Company, he thus expresses his views:-- "Of myself, I trust I may be excused when I say, that the highest object of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of life--my turn of mind--my disposition, long ago impelled me to give all my leisure, and all my opportunities of observation, to the introduction of steam-vessels, and permanently establishing them as the means of communication between India and England including all the colonies on the route. The vast importance of three months' earlier information to his Majesty's government, and to the Honourable Company,--whether relative to a war or a peace--to abundant or to short crops--to the sickness or convalescence of a colony or district, and oftentimes even of an individual; the advantages to the merchant, by enabling him to regulate his supplies and orders according to circumstances and demands; the anxieties of the thousands of my countrymen in India for accounts, and further accounts, of their parents, children, and friends at home; the corresponding anxieties of those relatives and friends in this country;--in a word, the speediest possible transit of letters to the tens of thousands who at all times in solicitude await them, was, to my mind, a service of the greatest general importance; and it shall not be my fault if I do not, and for ever establish it."