My dearest , Here we are becalmed, the sea looking like a plate of silver that has been cleaned by a remarkably good under-butler. He has not left a spot on it. The sky is nearly as clear, and the thermometer is at 88° under the awning, and the nights are as hot as the days. Rather bad! but that is what we came for partly. We had great luck on our voyage till within the last sixteen days, and during that time we have not made 300 miles; still as long as we had any wind, even though we could not do more by constant tacking than keep our own ground, it was not so hot as in this stagnant calm; and this heat will have prepared us so well for Calcutta that we might almost be allowed to go there now. We are within six days’ run of it all the time, which is provoking. However we are all remarkably well, even to Mars, who has been very seriously ill since we left the Cape, but has rallied completely.
We do what we can to vary the days: try to catch fish, in which we never succeed, except that two days ago we caught a great shark; and
