“No sooner had my husband left me than I ordered a big bowl, or rather my basin, full of paste, and flew off to my work in my own little home. Foreseeing, like a prudent housewife, that nothing elegant could be procured at Talwandi, I have brought a quantity of the loveliest wall-paper that ever I saw—pale lilac ground, as smooth as satin, with a pattern of roses twining over a trellis of gold. Nothing can be more tasteful, or more suited to make ‘Paradise’ (as I have named our little bungalow) a sort of fairy bower. I had Nabi Bakhsh and Mangal to help me in the work of papering my room; for though I have brought a huge brush, I could not do all the pasting myself. I could, however, trust nothing that required common sense to my assistants: for I found Mangal putting my roses upside down; and when I bade Nabi Bakhsh hang my pictures on some brass nails which Robin had fixed in the wall, I saw the drawing representing our church so placed that the tower and trees hung downwards, suspended, as it seemed, from the sky! Of course, it was absurd to begin to hang up pictures before I had papered the room; but I did so because it gave me such pleasure to see them whenever I glanced up from my work. Nor could I resist the pleasure of filling the book-shelves (also Robin’s kind thought) with my very prettiest books. “How I laboured that day! how I swung my big brush, and dashed the paste over the brick-work! You would have laughed, Lizzie, to have seen your Ailie perched on a ladder, now stopping to look down to direct or scold her assistants, now dabbing paste on the ugly bare wall, which was not graced with even a coating of whitewash. I worked and worked till hands were tired and head was throbbing and eyes aching from looking up. Then I stopped to admire my rosy bower, and went on again with fresh vigour. I pasted away as long as the light lasted, and then, not wishing Harold to see the work incomplete, I left my huge roll of paper (a good deal lessened in size) on the floor, sent Mangal to look after cooking the dinner, quitted the house, and locked the door behind me. No one should enter ‘Paradise’ as long as one brick remained uncovered in its bare ugliness in that room.