_Miss Eden to Lady Theresa Lister._ CAMP UMBALLA, _November 5, 1839_. MY DEAREST THERESA, I have not heard from you for a long time, but one of the last overland letters mentioned that you had been ill, so it is tempting to write and hope that you are well again. The wife of the Private Secretary[480] came with me from Simla, because in compliment to my weaker health I made shorter marches to the foot of the hills with the last fat baby, Auckland Colvin[481] refusing to sit anywhere but in her lap, and the baby before that refusing to go to sleep unless she slept in the same tent with him, in which there were the three children, two Portuguese Ayahs, and the children’s favourite bearers. No light, because the candles had been sent on by mistake to the next ground; no carpets, because ditto; so that the servants kicked up a dust even in their sleep. Several Pariah dogs were playfully avoiding the Jackals, and about thirty bearers sleeping or smoking on the kynants, or the space between the lining and the outside of the tent. “_That I saw_,” as Sydney Smith used to say in his charity sermons when he was stating a particular case of distress which he not only never had seen, but never heard of. This was in our encampment in the hills, when the climate was still delicious. Now the thermometer stands at 90 in the tents, and these unfortunate ladies begin to march at four in the evening. I do not know that the horn signifies, as I defy anybody to sleep in camp more than two hours, and it is being uncommonly acute to snatch at that the first week, till the sentries have learnt to stop the tent-pitchers and camel-drivers from knocking down and packing up all night at unlawful hours. I got Captain Codrington, our Quarter-master, to stay behind last night instead of going on to pitch the advanced camp, that he might see and hear what a quantity of illicit pitching and packing went on, and the result was that he imprisoned 160 tent-pitchers, 56 camels, and removed out of hearing the neighing horses of half the clerks in the public offices, and we all went to sleep for at least half-an-hour, which was very grand. Moreover, it is a rule that nothing should leave the ground till the Governor-General’s carriage goes by, and a gun is fired to announce that highly important event; so to-day this rule was enforced, and in a country of hot dust, which this is, a very good rule it is. But it was funny to see the crowds of old men and beasts the advance guard had stopped, camels and elephants innumerable, our own band, several hundreds of grass-cutters’ ponies laden with grass for sale, palanquins full of small half-caste babies, everybody’s pet dog with their bearers, sofas and arm-chairs. My own tame pheasants in their wooden house I saw in the _mêlée_.