Mentone, 4 January 1869.
Referring to your letter of the 31st ulto in which you notify me that further application for extension of the leave of absence granted to me has been refused, I have the honour to request that you will be so good as to submit my case to the Secretary of State for the Colonies.
Page 283
The original text appears to be a letter written on January 4, 1869, from Mentone. The content discusses a request for an extension of leave of absence that was refused, and the writer is asking for the matter to be submitted to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. The provided OCR output contains fragmented and disordered text. I have reordered the text to form coherent paragraphs and corrected spelling errors while maintaining the original content and structure as much as possible. Here is the reformatted text in HTML as requested:Anseed 12
January 1869 /
Zo. S
RECE
C:0:
JAN 7 1869
has been transformed into the above coherent letter. Additional page information:222 Hong Kong
Hotel de la Pain
283
These lines are kept as they represent page numbers or other metadata.