getting on well and happily at school.

[Sidenote: Tientsin.]
[Sidenote: Its climate.]

_Tientsin.--November 14th._--Here I am again in the house which I
occupied two and a half months ago, and which is by far the nicest
Chinese house I have seen, and its exposure to the sun is now most
agreeable. The climate is at present charming. If nothing else had
been done by these recent proceedings, the fact of placing our troops
and embassy here, instead of in the south of China, would have been
almost worth the trouble. It is also a much drier climate than that of
Shanghae. We have had about seven days of rain in all, since I left
Shanghae in July. Frederick had nineteen days consecutively just
before he left Shanghae. He was not well himself then, but he is all
right now. His ride to Pekin--eighty miles in thirty hours--set him up
again. I found the Admiral very cordial. ... Gros is not yet come, and
I do not like to depart from here without seeing him.

He was detained at Tientsin for several days, arranging a variety of
matters of detail; and it was not till the morning of the 26th of November
that he found himself once more afloat on the Gulf of Pecheli, on board the
'Ferooz,' homeward bound.

[Sidenote: Results of the mission.]

The general results obtained by the mission thus happily terminated cannot
be better summed up than in the words of the despatch in which the Foreign
Minister, Lord J. Russell, conveyed to Lord Elgin Her Majesty's 'full
approbation of his conduct in the various particulars' above described.

'The convention,' he wrote, 'which you concluded with the Prince of Kung on
the 24th of October is entirely satisfactory to Her Majesty's Government.
It records the reparation made by the Emperor of China for his disregard in
the previous year of his Treaty engagements; it sets Her Majesty's
Government free from an implied engagement not to insist in all particulars
on the fulfilment of those engagements; it imposes upon China a fine, in
the shape of an augmented rate of indemnity; it affords an additional
opening for British trade; it places on a recognised footing the emigration
of Chinese coolies, whose services are so important to Her Majesty's
colonial possessions; it relieves Her Majesty's colony of Hong Kong from a
source of previous annoyance; and it provides for bringing generally to the
knowledge of the Chinese the engagements into which the