I think it has rained incessantly since I wrote to your mother last, and most people have passed their time in mopping up the wet in their houses, but ours has behaved like an angel, and since the first day has never had a leak. The roofs here are all flat, and made of mud beat into a stiff consistency; but when the rain _does_ get through, the drippings are of a muddy nature. Captain M., after moving into every corner of his house, used to write under an umbrella; and Captain B. and his companion Dr. S. have dined every day in their house with umbrellas held over their heads and their dinners. Still, I do not dislike the rain so much as most people do. There is often a fine half-hour before sunset, in which it is easy to take a canter, quite long enough for the exercise of the day; and whenever it is not actually pouring, the hills are perfectly beautiful and the evening skies are not amiss. Then it is always cool, and people should make much of that blessing. We had an arrival two days ago of a box of new books; that is, new to us. You may remember them in the early part of the reign of Victoria the First, but the pleasure of seeing them is very great. I have read all our old ones (and we have a great collection) at least three times over, even including the twenty-one volumes of St. Simon, which I read once on board ship and now again here; and it certainly is a wonderfully amusing book. I must have begun it again if the box had not appeared. To think of our only having yet received in this legal, direct manner, the eighteenth number of Pickwick! We finished it six months ago, because it is printed and reprinted at Calcutta from overland copies. Mais, je vous demande un peu--what should we have done, if we had waited for the lawful supply, to know Pickwick's end? I see you are making a great fuss about copyrights, &c., which I cannot understand, as we see it only by bits and scraps; but I beg to announce that I am entirely for piracy and surreptitious and cheap editions, and an early American copy of an English novel for three rupees, instead of a late English one at twenty-two shillings. 'Them's my sentiments' for the next three years at least. As it is, I am reading with deep attention 'Lady Annabella,' by the author of 'Constance,' which was, I remember, a remarkably pretty novel; and so is this, only the heroine will call her mother 'My lady.' I keep hoping it is a joke, and pretend to laugh every time it occurs, but it looks frightfully serious at times. Perhaps the fashion of calling one's mother 'My lady' may have come in, though, since my time. All our plans have come into shape, and rather satisfactorily. We shall not leave this till the first week in November, when the great heat of the plains will be over. We are to meet Runjeet on the 20th, or thereabouts, at Ferozepore, when also the army will be assembled under Sir G. R.