There is an old blind General of 98 at Barrackpore, and his wife (who is 84) has just been couched, and sees with one eye, which is the only eye they have between them, and now the old man is going to be couched, and their pet doctor is ordered off with one of the marching regiments. They applied for an exchange for the doctor, which Sir Jasper refused, and the old lady came crying about it to Barrackpore last week; but I did not think I could well ask for it. However, she wrote a moving letter yesterday, and it is so hard at 90 and 80 to be thwarted in one of the very few wishes one can form, that I took courage, and set off this morning and expounded the case to Sir Jasper, who is very good-natured, and I rather think will do what they want. Sir Henry Fane would have snapped anybody’s nose right off who had asked him for any favour of the sort. It will make the old Morleys very happy. The glare was so great that I think I shall have to be couched too; but that, of course, the doctor will do gratis. My eyesight is shockingly bad—I mean even for my age—and I have a strong and decided preference for large print.
I quite forget what one does of an evening in England. Here we dine at eight and go to bed at ten, so a short game at cards after coffee fills up the time, and nobody can read by the flickering lights here. Perhaps you will play at Beg-of-my-Neighbour with me; and then we shall step out, and smell the night-blooming stock in that little round border by the breakfast-room, and listen to the nightingales, and then go to bed, and I hope you will tell the bearers not to go to sleep when they are pulling the punkah in the company-room, because that wakes me.
Dear me! I sometimes feel very English just now, but ungainly, and with an idea that you will all laugh at us. I remember so well seeing all the Lowry Coles[509] debark at Lord de Grey’s from the Cape, and they were very unlike other people, and had very odd bonnets on.
September 15.
This must go. We have had a hard-working week,—a great farewell dinner to the Nicolls, and then to attend a play which Sir Jasper bespoke, and which lasted till near one. We luckily did not go till ten, but the audience who had sat there since eight were nearly dead, and we were all horribly hard-worked. Then I have been making a sketch of Dost Mahomed and his family, and he set off this morning for the Upper Provinces, leaving me with one of his nephews unsketched. So this morning, with immense activity I got up early, and Colvin abstracted the nephew from the steamer and brought him to sit for his picture before breakfast. The nephew is very like the picture of Judas Iscariot. They are all very Jewish, but he is a fine subject, and considering Colvin had had no breakfast, he seemed to talk Persian with wonderful animation. Ever, dearest Sister, yours most affectionately,
E. EDEN.
Miss Eden to the Countess of Buckinghamshire.
BARRACKPORE,
October 8, 1841.
MY DEAREST SISTER, It is time to be writing again. Only three, or, at most four times more. It makes me yawn and stretch, with a sort of nervous shivering—just as one used to feel as a child the morning before going to the play with the idea that by some particular mischance that day never would come to an end, or that the theatre would tumble down, or somebody take our box. I have those theatrical misgivings and yearnings about the next three or four months, and I wish the September post would come, just to make sure that the new Governor-General[510] is a man of active packing habits. I want to go in February. They say now that going in March makes such a long voyage. I think it is rather lucky that this month’s news did not go home by last month’s mail. That sounds Irish, because, as you justly observe, it is not so easy to advance a month’s news as it might be a month’s allowance; but there is George with his predatory habits up to the ears in preparation for a Burmese war, and if that news had got home in time, the Court of Directors would probably have made a strong objection to a change of rulers at the beginning of a war.
It may still go off, but the villain [illegible] who is almost a savage, has suddenly moved down to within 24 hours’ distance of our territories with a horde of fifty thousand men, plenty of guns, boats, etc., and in short, he looks full of mischief, all the more that he is egged on by the Chinese. He may change his mind and take fright at the last minute, but in the meanwhile he gives just as much trouble as if he had declared war, and George has had a very busy week, ordering off regiments, taking up transports, buying stores, etc., and as usual, if a thing has to be done in a hurry, he has to see to it all himself. He lives in a rage with the slowness of the people whose real work it is, but by dint of aggravating them, he gets them through their work. I see the necessity of sending out a fresh English head of affairs, with the English constitution and habits of business, every five or six years. He keeps all the poor languid Indians moving.