Her own letters to Mrs. Hamilton, while on board, are cheery as usual, and speak no word of pain or longing for all that she had left behind; indeed the very first ends merrily: ‘Please give my kindest love to your dearest girl, and tell her that I have already hung up her famous bag. I hope that no ayah will bag it! I could not resist the pun, bad as it is.’
There were five ayahs on board, and she soon struck up an acquaintance with one of them,—a Christian ayah,—reading aloud her Hindustani Bible, and delighted to find that the ayah could understand what was read. ‘I am bribing one to teach me,’ she wrote. ‘The ayahs ought to be glad to help; for they, at least two or three of them, seem to regard me as a kind of supplementary nurse, and if they want to go to work make over the baby to me.’ In the same letter she states: ‘We have a strong Missionary force on board; two Scotchmen, the wife of one of them, and six Missionary ladies. We have not quarrelled at all; but then, most of us have been sea-sick!’—again a little glimmer of fun. ‘We lady Missionaries get on very well together,’ she says in another letter. ‘Very gentle and modest are the Misses A., “your pretty girls,” as Lady I. called them to-day.’
As to amusements on board, she wrote:—
‘Lady I. has started a game which dear Leila and Fred may add to their store at Christmas. She wrote something, missing out all adjectives. A gentleman went round and collected adjectives haphazard from the passengers, inserting them in the places left blank. The piece was then read out. It was a description of the voyage and many of the passengers. Of course nobody could be offended, because the adjectives came haphazard. But how your young folk would have laughed when, amongst other personages described, came—“Miss Tucker, of a grandiloquent disposition, with other bouncing Missionary ladies.”’
About a fortnight later she wrote:—
‘A contrast to —— is Mr. S., the competition-wallah, probably the most highly educated man in the ship. I look upon him as the Squire of the Mission ladies. In his most quiet, proper fashion, he is ever ready to do our behests; and he never seems to tire of hymn-singing.... He has evidently plenty of moral courage. The very funniest thing was that Mr. S. was actually present at the solemn conclave held by us six M. L.[24] to decide whether we could conscientiously attend a second theatrical amateur performance, Mr. S. having been the principal actor in the first one, which we did attend. It was as if Garrick had been present at a Clapham conference on the subject of whether it were right to go to see him act!!! Mr. S. was very amiable and good: he had taken a great deal of trouble to amuse the passengers, and his part was perfectly unexceptionable; but if we all absent ourselves next time I do not think that he will take any offence. I proposed that we should all sleep over the matter, one of my reasons being that I could not but feel Mr. S.’s presence a little embarrassing. On the following day we met without him, and decided that the question is to be an open one; each M. L. is to judge according to her own conscience. I believe that we shall divide; but this is not, we have agreed, to disturb the harmony between the M. L.’
After a few days spent in ‘bright, beautiful Bombay’—these are her own words—she proceeded by rail with one companion to Allahabad. A pause at Jabalpur had been planned, but this fell through; and they accomplished the whole long journey of 845 miles without a break. Wisely, her friends had insisted on first-class, and she was none the worse for the fatigue. On the very morning of her arrival at Allahabad she could say: ‘I had a nice warm bath, and then a good breakfast, and I feel almost as fresh as if I had not travelled 845 miles at a stretch, but merely taken a little drive. Think how strong I must be!’
Later in the same letter, a long and cheery one, bearing no signs of fatigue, she speaks of Mr. George Bowen, an American Missionary, who had ‘laboured without intermission for twenty-eight years’ in the East, and who was known among Natives as ‘the English Faqir,’ on account of his wandering and self-denying life.
‘He will take no salary,’ she wrote, ‘but has earned his own living, I hear, by teaching, supporting himself on the merest trifle. I esteem it a great honour that I sat beside him at breakfast at the Zenana Mission House last Thursday. Mr. Bowen looks quite skin and bone, wondrously thin, but not in the least unhealthy, but as if there were plenty of work in him still. He told me that he does not “believe in age.” He seems to feel as fresh as he did twenty-eight years ago; and yet at the beginning of his career he was so fearfully ill that his life was given up, and he wrote his farewell to his mother. As India has agreed so splendidly with Mr. Bowen, I asked him—as I generally do those who thrive in the climate—whether he drank only water. “Tea,” he replied, smiling. He gave his opinion that to take stimulant here is “the way to have to leave the country.” Almost all the Missionaries whom I have met appear to be water-drinkers. I am particularly delighted with the American Missionaries whom I have seen.... I am ashamed of ever having had a prejudice against Yankees. I am attracted also by Native Christian ladies.’