July 20, 1861._
My dear Mother,--I am, as you will see, now commencing my retreat
westwards, and have left the wild and savage Moluccas and New Guinea for
Java, the Garden of the East, and probably without any exception the
finest island in the world. My plans are to visit the interior and
collect till November, and then work my way to Singapore so as to return
home and arrive in the spring. Travelling here will be a much pleasanter
business than in any other country I have visited, as there are good
roads, regular posting stages, and regular inns or lodging-houses all
over the interior, and I shall no more be obliged to carry about with me
that miscellaneous lot of household furniture--bed, blankets, pots,
kettles and frying pan, plates, dishes and wash-basin, coffee-pots and
coffee, tea, sugar and butter, salt, pickles, rice, bread and wine,
pepper and curry powder, and half a hundred more odds and ends, the
constant looking after which, packing and repacking, calculating and
contriving, have been the standing plague of my life for the last seven
years. You will better understand this when I tell you that I have made
in that time about eighty movements, averaging one a month, at every one
of which all of these articles have had to be rearranged and repacked by
myself according to the length of the trip, besides a constant personal
supervision to prevent waste or destruction of stores in places where it
is impossible to supply them.
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