We are truly here in the case of the women grinding at the mill.  Who would have supposed a few days ago that poor Ritchie would have been the first summoned?  About two days before Canning’s departure, I asked him to come and see me; he talked with me for an hour.  In the evening a note was received from his wife to say that they could not dine at Government House, as he was seriously indisposed.  He appears to have felt the first symptom of his malady while he was sitting with me.  This afternoon I attend his funeral.  He is a great loss; he seems to have been very much liked and esteemed.

The death of Mr. Ritchie, followed by the appointment of Sir B. Frere to the Government of Bombay, the promotion of Mr. Beadon to the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal, and the retirement of Mr. Laing owing to ill health, left only Sir R. Napier remaining of the five members of Council whom Lord Elgin found in office; and, though the vacant places were soon afterwards most ably filled, the change of councillors necessarily added to the labours of a new Governor-General.  He did not, however, during the first comparatively cool months, find the work too much for him.  ’On the contrary,’ he wrote, ’time would be heavy on hand if I had not enough to fill it.’

[Sidenote:  Mode of Life.]

The days (he wrote to Lady Elgin) are very uniform in their round of occupations, so I have little to record that is interesting.  As long as one has health, it is easy to do a good deal of work here, because for twelve hours in the day (from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M.) there is no inducement to leave the house.  I have hitherto had a little exercise before and after those hours.  I rush into the garden when I awake, and return when the sun appears, glowing and angry, above the horizon.

In another letter he describes the plan, characteristic of his sociable and genial temperament, which he adopted in order at once to get through his work, and to obtain a competent knowledge of persons whose opinions were worth having.

I have two or three people to dine with me on every day on which I have not a great dinner.  By this means I get acquainted with individuals, and if my bees have any honey in them I extract it at the moment of the day when it is most gushing.[2] It is very convenient, besides, because it enables me to converse by candlelight with persons who want to talk to me about their private affairs, instead of wasting daylight upon them.  Unless I get out of sorts, I hope to become personally acquainted in this way with everyone, whose views may be useful to me, before I leave Calcutta, even to go to Barrackpore.

As the season went on, the heat became greater.  ‘For the last few days,’ he wrote on June 1, ’it has been very hot; quite as hot, they say, as it ever is.  I am longing for the rains, which are to cool us, I am told.’  The rains came, and, so long as they continued to fall, the temperature was lower:  but ‘the heavy, dull, damp, calm heat between the falls,’ he found most trying.