We have been at home now nearly three weeks, and I have been a free man again twelve days.  Her Majesty’s ships have been paid off on the 9th of this month.  Properly speaking, indeed, we have been at home longer, for we touched at Plymouth and trod English ground and saw English green fields on the 23rd of October, but we were allowed to remain only twenty-four hours, and to my great disgust were ordered round to Chatham to be paid off.  The ill-luck which had made our voyage homeward so long (we sailed from Sydney on the 2nd of May) pursued us in the Channel, and we did not reach Chatham until the 2nd of November; and what do you think was one of the first things I did when we reached Plymouth?  Wrote to Eliza K. asking news of a certain naughty sister of mine, from whom I had never heard a word since we had been away—­and if perchance there should be any letter, begging her to forward it immediately to Chatham.  And so, when at length we got there, I found your kind long letter had been in England some six or seven months; but hearing of the likelihood of our return, they had very judiciously not sent it to me.

Your letter, my poor Lizzie, justifies many a heartache I have had when thinking over your lot, knowing, as I well do, what emigrant life is in climates less trying than that in which you live.  I have seen a good deal of bush life in Australia, and it enables me fully to sympathise with and enter into every particular you tell me—­from the baking and boiling and pigs squealing, down to that ferocious landshark Mrs. Gunther, of whose class Australia will furnish fine specimens.  Had I been at home, too, I could have enlightened the good folks as to the means of carriage in the colonies, and could have told them that the two or twenty thousand miles over sea is the smallest part of the difficulty and expense of getting anything to people living inland; as it is, I think I have done some good in the matter; their meaning was good but their discretion small.  But the obtuseness of English in general about anything out of the immediate circle of their own experience is something wonderful.

I had heard here and there fractional accounts of your doings from Eliza K. and my mother—­not of the most cheery description—­and therefore I was right glad to get your letter, which, though it tells of sorrow and misfortune enough and to spare, yet shows me that the brave woman’s heart you always had, my dearest Lizzie, is still yours, and that you have always had the warm love of those immediately around you, and now, as the doctor’s letter tells us, you have one more source of joy and happiness, and this new joy must efface the bitterness—­I do not say the memory, knowing how impossible that would be—­of your great loss. [The death of her little daughter Jessie].  God knows, my dear sister, I could feel for you.  It was as if I could see again a shadow of the great sorrow that fell upon us all years ago.