MY DEAREST GEORGE, Having in our former letters nearly settled all our business matters, I may venture this time to indulge you with a few lighter topics.... This house is what Bob would call _chuck full_, but I do not think you know any of the company except the Markhams[70] and Mrs. Graham. I think all the Markhams pleasant in their way. Anne is rather an odd fellow, but very amusing, and Frederica is very pleasant. Cecilia desires me to give you her kind remembrance. As for your friend Mr. Graham,[71] though I would not wish to be severe, yet I cannot think a man who wears a light sort of mulberry-coloured “don’t mentions,” from a wish to look _waspish_, can be any great shakes. The rest of his character may be very good perhaps, but I can hardly think so under these circumstances. Your Bess has been making sad work of it indeed, and I wish she had not been promised to Sister, for the Granthams are enquiring everywhere for a dog of that description, and I think Bess would find this place pleasanter than Eastcombe. Your most affectionate E. E. _Miss Eden to Lady Buckinghamshire._ NEWBY HALL [1818]. MY DEAREST SISTER, Your pride must be getting up again, I should imagine, and I must give it a little epistolary pat on the back (what a remarkably odd clever expression) to keep it all smooth. My illness was remarkably opportune, inasmuch as it began at Studley,[72] and which was so uncommonly dull, that the impossibility of dining down was an immense advantage that I had over the rest of society. We were nineteen at dinner every day. We were all immensely formal in the evening. The house is but a bad one in the old-fashioned way, and my room was peculiarly liable to murder and that sort of accident, a large dark green bed with black feathers on the top, stuck in a deep alcove, and on one side of it an enormous dark closet, quite full of banditti I fancy, and all the rest of the room actually swarming with ghosts I know, only I was much too sleepy to lay awake and look at them. Mrs. Lawrence has an unhappy turn for music without any very remarkable genius, and we played 150 pages of the dryest Duetts in the Dussek and Pleyel style without even changing our time, or rising into a forte, or sinking into a piano, and minding every Repeat and Da Capo in the book. On Wednesday Lord Grantham and Mr. Graham went on some Yeomanry business to Leeds, on Thursday we came home to my great joy. Adieu, my dearest sister; this has been written in a confusion of tongues, and I cannot make it any longer by any means. Ever your most affec. E. EDEN. _P.S._--I have got a beautiful black cloth gown for two guineas, so fine you never saw the like. _Emily Eden to Lady Buckinghamshire._ NEWBY HALL, _November_ [1818].