loose on matters I really care about.' He writes a (fourth) letter to
his mother between Paris and Marseilles in the same spirit. 'I don't
know whether you understand it,' he says, 'but if I had said "No" to
India, I should feel as if I had been a coward and had lost the right to
respect myself or to profess the doctrines I have always held and
preached about the duty of doing the highest thing one can and of not
making an idol of domestic comfort.' He continued to write to his mother
regularly, dictating letters when disabled from writing by his fever,
and the whole series, carefully numbered by her from 1 to 129, now lies
before me. He wrote with almost equal regularity to other members of his
family, of which he considered my sister-in-law, then Miss
Thackeray,[102] to be an adopted member; and occasionally to other
friends, such as Carlyle, Froude, and Venables. But to his mother he
always devoted the first part of the time at his disposal. The pressure
of work limits a few of these letters to mere assertions of his
continued health and happiness; but he is always anxious to tell her any
little anecdotes likely to interest her. I will give one of these,
because it is striking in itself, and his frequent references to it
showed how much it had impressed him. An English party, one of whom told
him the story, visited a wild gorge on the Brahmapootra, famous for a
specially holy shrine. There they fell in with a fakeer, who had
wandered for twenty years through all the holy places between the
Himalayas and Cape Comorin. He had travelled on foot; he had never lain
down, and only rested at night by putting his arms through the loop of a
rope. His body was distorted and his legs and arms wasted and painful.
He came with a set of villagers to the shrine which was to be the end of
all his wanderings; 'did poojah,' and so finished his task. The
villagers worshipped him, and prepared a feast and a comfortable bed;
but the fakeer looked sad and said, 'No! When I began my journey the
goddess Kali appeared to me and told me what I was to do. Had I done it
rightly, she would have appeared again to tell me that she was
satisfied. Now I must visit all the shrines once more,' and in spite of
all persuasion he set out for another twenty years' penance. 'I assure
you,' said the narrator, 'that I thought it very sad and did not laugh
in the least.' 'Was not that,' says Fitzjames, 'a truly British
comment?'

These and other letters have