Cloudy and heavy showers, clearing toward night. An arrangement has been made to send the bag to Queenstown instead of Liverpool, which will give us a day later. Nevertheless I had work enough to employ me pretty sedulously until two o’ clock. I then proposed to my son Brooks who returned this morning with Mary from Walton to go down and visit the India Museum which is open to visiters. We walked down in a pretty heavy shower of rain. The collection is in various departments and is worth seeing. The natural products, vegetable, mineral, the animals, birds, insects and fishes, the arts and customs, the idols, furniture, clothing, arms, luxuries, manufactures are all illustrated in such a way as to give quite an accurate idea of the resources of this distant part of the globe. These things have all been just so for an infinite number of years. The difference is that the improvement does not keep pace with the more enterprising European. At home I found some newspapers from America which for the first time gave me a little encouragement. And yet I scarcely could see why unless it was that it was not bad. Evening at home. read part of the preface of Genl Fry’s War of the Peninsula.228