I can hardly write because I am in the middle of 'Lamb's Life and Letters'--such a nice book! I quite dread going on with it for fear of finishing it. It sometimes does almost as well as you to talk with for five minutes. I like the way in which he goes on revelling in a bad joke, making nonsense by the piece; and there are such good little bits of real feeling. 'All about you is a threadbare topic. I have worn it out with thinking; it has come to me when I have been dull with anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it, than to have introduced it. I want you, you don't know how much.' Such a jewel of a man to have put that into words, and it is so true! I often find myself _saucing_ up my distaste for the present with regret for the past, and so disguising a little discontent with a great deal of sentiment; but yet that is rather unfair too, for I really should not mind India if you and three or four others were here. The discontent with it arises a great deal from want of the old familiar friends. However, we have at last done two years of it. I believe it has taken us forty English years to do these two Indian ones; but still it shows what time and longevity will effect. Mr. Y. brought rather an interesting individual to my tent this morning, a Christianised Indian; he has been a strict Christian for nearly twenty-three years, and last year the Bishop ordained him. He was a Brahmin of the highest class, and is a very learned man. I asked him how his conversion began, whether from discontent with his own belief, or from the persuasions of others; and he said he was dissatisfied with his own superstitions, and got a copy of Henry Martyn's translation of St. John, and then of the Acts, and then went back to the rest of the Bible. Mrs. Sherwood, who lived at Meerut, was afterwards his chief instructress, and he speaks of her with the greatest gratitude. He keeps a school now, which is attended by about forty children, but he does not think he has made any real converts. I wish he could have spoken English: I wanted to know more about it all. He was here a long time, and I did rather a highly-finished picture of him, thinking the old Bishop would like it. He is rather like Sidney Smith blackened, and laughed about as heartily as Sidney would have done at his own picture. Tuesday, March 6.