returning to you all: crossing the Pacific, and from Sydney home, will not take much time.
As soon as the Captain invalided I at once determined to leave the "Beagle", but it was quite absurd what a revolution in five minutes was effected in all my feelings. I have long been grieved and most sorry at the interminable length of the voyage (although I never would have quitted it); but the minute it was all over, I could not make up my mind to return. I could not give up all the geological castles in the air which I had been building up for the last two years. One whole night I tried to think over the pleasure of seeing Shrewsbury again, but the barren plains of Peru gained the day. I made the following scheme (I know you will abuse me, and perhaps if I had put it in execution, my father would have sent a mandamus after me); it was to examine the Cordilleras of Chili during this summer, and in winter go from port to port on the coast of Peru to Lima, returning this time next year to Valparaiso, cross the Cordilleras to Buenos Ayres, and take ship to England. Would not this have been a fine excursion, and in sixteen months I should have been with you all? To have endured Tierra del Fuego and not seen the Pacific would have been miserable...