I had just wrote this, my dear, when I heard my papa’s voice—
“Where are you, miss? What’s come to the girl?”
“Here, dear sir; here to serve you,” I cried, and ran to meet him.
“Why, miss,” says Mr Freyne, “here’s the rival prophets both coming up to the house at once. I must have you sit by with your sewing, as meek as if you had never passed a saucy remark on your betters in your life, and take down their doleful prophecies, so as we may laugh at ’em a year hence.”
My Amelia knows one of these prophets: ’tis good Captain Colquhoun. The other is a young gentleman of the name of Dash, one of the Company’s writers here, the son of an old friend of my papa’s, and commended to his favourable notice by his father. Mr Dash is one of those persons who feel themselves competent to direct the whole œconomy of any business in which they are interested, and who, since it han’t pleased Providence to place them in authority, bear a grudge against such as occupy the situation they would fain fill.
“So you see, sir,” says Captain Colquhoun to my papa, when the gentlemen were seated, “I was right in telling you the Soubah was dead.”
(So he is, Amelia. The news was confirmed on Monday, when I wrote you last, but my head was so full of other things that I forgot it.)
“If you’d be so obliging as to say who’s to succeed him, it might profit us not a little at this moment, sir,” says Mr Freyne.
“Since the Presidency is leaning towards the side of Gosseta Begum, I would lay my money on the Chuta Nabob,” says Mr Dash.
“The Presidency,” said the Captain, “is doing its best to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and that ends in destruction.”