We came home hotter than we went out. William [Osborne] and Fanny had been on the river, which was still worse. Dinner was not refreshing.
Then we all went out in the verandah, where there are great pans of water used for wetting the mats put over the windows, and the Aides-de-Camp found a new diversion in putting Chance in one pan, while three of them lifted the other and poured the water over him. He growled, as he used to do at you, to show he did not think those liberties allowable, but immediately jumped into the empty pan to have the bath repeated, whereat we all laughed, for that amounts to a good joke in India. But we never laugh more than two minutes at a time; it is too fatiguing. So then we went, like Lydia Bennet, to a good game at Lottery tickets. Our intellects fell last year from whist pitch, and now they have fallen below écarté, but the whole household can understand Lottery, and except that it is too much trouble to hand a rupee from one card to another, we all like it very much.
At ten o’clock, Fanny and William and I went to a little sailing-boat he has here, and we should have sailed, and it would have been cooler if there had been any air. But there was a lovely moon, and the Hoogly is a handsome bit of river, and we floated about for an hour, and then went to bed. And so ends that eventful day.
We are all very well, though I have been rather ailing for ten days, but in a general way you are quite right; I have very much better health here than I had at home. So all my abuse of the climate is gratuitous; I do not owe it any spite, except for being so very disagreeable. I trust there is a letter from you somewhere on the sea. George has sent for this, so God bless you. I have not time to read it over. Yours ever,
E. EDEN.
Miss Eden to Mr. C. Greville.
GOVERNMENT HOUSE,
Sept. 11, 1837.
MY DEAR MR. GREVILLE, George says he thinks I ought to write to you, which is rather an impertinent thought of his, because he does not know that I have not been writing to you every day, and he does not know that I have nothing to say, and that out of that nothing I have already furnished him with eight letters for this overland post. But he says there is ¾ of an hour yet before the last Bombay dawdle goes. Three-quarters of an hour for the preparation of a letter that is to travel 15,000 miles!
I am not going to comment on the dear young Queen; that I have done in the other letters. But I never think of anything else, and we are all dying of fevers brought on by court mourning, and curiosity coming on the rainy season. Our own approaching journey[448] is one other great interest, and we all declare we are packing up. It is almost as fatiguing lying on the sofa and wondering what is to become of all one’s property as actually packing up, and may perhaps by perseverance produce some result. But hitherto I have not done more than that personally. The faithful Byrne, and the rest of his staff, have gradually removed many of the comforts, and in two days the band and the horses and most of the servants depart, and, as William Osborne observes with real consternation, we shall not have above eight servants apiece left to wait on us.
Certainly some of the arrangements are amusing. I asked Byrne just now what our Ayahs (or black Lady’s Maids) were allowed to put their travelling-gear in. “Half a camel!” he said, with an air of reproach at such desperate ignorance. “Oh, half a camel apiece,” I said, looking intelligent, and laying an emphasis on apiece as if that had been my doubt, and you know one hears such strange stories of camels carrying a supply of water for their own private drinking, quite honestly, though they have drunk it already, that I was ready to believe the Ayah, veils and bangles, travelled the same way. But Byrne obligingly added that each camel carried two trunks, one of which each Abigail might claim.