Having preserved these hasty recollections of the past week, I return to my journey.

Being anxious to prevent Miss Stowe, who I feared had, on hearing of her poor brother's illness, set out from Calcutta to join him, from coming to Dacca, I did not take the direct northern course by the great jeels, but sailed eastward across the Delaserry river and a wide tract of flooded country, which offered a strange and dreary spectacle, from the manner in which the wretched villages were huddled together on little mounds of earth, just raised above the level of the inundation, while all the rest was covered with five or six feet of water, I thought of Gray's picture of the Egyptian Delta, whose peasants

But these villages do any thing but glitter. At length we passed them all, and entered what might be called a sea of reeds. It was, in fact, a vast jeel or marsh, whose tall rushes rise above the surface of the water, having depth enough for a very large vessel. We sailed briskly on, rustling like a greyhound in a field of corn: while in one place where the reeds were thickest, and I tried the depth with an oar, there was, I should guess, at least ten feet water, besides whatever else there might be of quagmire.