Cecilia de Roos’s[434] marriage; and poor old Lady Salisbury,[435] it somehow seems as if nothing but fire could destroy her. I am going down to look over the box that contains the dresses in which we are to appear at our first Drawing-room to-morrow, and my blonde gown may, and in all probability will, come out quite yellow and fresh-patterned by the cockroaches. Your most affectionate E. EDEN. _Miss Eden to Mrs. Lister._ BARRACKPORE, _March 24, 1836_. MY DEAREST THERESA, In the utter bewilderment in which I live, from having more to do in the oven than I could get through comfortably in a nice bracing frost, I quite forget whether I wrote to you on my first arrival. I sent off so many letters, necessarily precisely like one another, that I have forgotten all about them, except that they announced our arrival after a five months’ voyage, and that we were in all the nervousness of a first arrival in a hot land of strangers. We have been here three weeks to-day, and are so accustomed to our way of life that I cannot help thinking we have been here much longer, and that it is nearly time to go home again. It is an odd dreamy existence in many respects, but horribly fatiguing realities breaking into it. It is more like a constant theatrical representation going on; everything is so picturesque and so utterly un-English. Wherever there is any state at all it is on the grandest scale. Every servant at Government House is a picture by himself, in his loose muslin robes, with scarlet and gold ropes round his waist, and his scarlet and gold turban over masses of black hair; and on the esplanade I hardly ever pass a native that I do not long to stop and sketch--some in satin and gold, and then perhaps the next thing you meet is a nice English Britschka with good horses driven by a turbaned coachman, and a tribe of running footmen by its side, and in it is one of the native Princes, dressed just as he was when he first came into the world, sitting cross-legged on the front seat very composedly smoking his hookah.