Then for two or three weeks we did not know what to do. And then in all that hot weather, at last we settled to move, and the arrangement of that great Admiralty was enough to murder an elephant. Then, when George set off on his Tour of the Ports, we came here, and just as we got settled, a Mr. Brogden bought Grosvenor Street, so that I had to go up and pack that up, and rout out the accumulated rubbish of sixteen years, and move all the books, etc. However they have done their worst now, we have parted with both our houses, and all our goods, and when we are turned out, must live in a tent under a hedge. I have got a little black King Charles’s spaniel of my own, that I mean to boil down, and make into a comfortable “sup of broth” when we come to that particular hedge “where my tired mind may rest and call it home.” I somehow feel as if I were sitting by watching George’s mad career, and wondering where it will end. I never set eyes on him--you have no idea what the labour of the Admiralty is--he never writes less than 35 letters every day in his own hand, besides what the Secretary and all the others do. Every Levée is a crowd of discontented men who would make an excellent crew for _one_ ship, he says, but as they each want one, he is obliged to refuse 99 out of every 100. However he is as happy as a king, I believe, only he has not had time to mention it. He likes his office of all things. The Admiralty is a splendid home to live in, but requires quantities of servants, and the more there are the more discontented they are. Everybody says what fortunate people we are, and I daresay George is, but my personal luck consists in having entirely lost his society and Greenwich, the two charms of my life; in being kept ten months of every year in London, which I loathe; and in being told to have people to dinner--without the means of dressing myself so as to be always in society. I wish Government would consider that, tho’ a man be raised high in office, yet that the unfortunate women remain just as poor as ever. Louisa (Mrs. Colvile) has just had her seventeenth child; Mary (Mrs. Drummond) her ninth; and Mrs. Eden is going to have her seventh. Lord Melbourne[410] made a good start in the House of Lords as far as speaking went. I do not know what ladies have hopes of him, but the “Fornarina,”[411] as he calls her himself, has him in greater thraldom than ever. I see him very often and confidentially, but both of us without any sinister designs. _Miss Eden to Lady Charlotte Greville._ HAM COMMON, _Friday [October 1834]._