Anyhow, I wish you would bestir yourself about our successor. It is high time he should be named; moreover, my stock of gloves is exhausted, so at all events I must come home. Do you think you could buy me instantly from Fownes a dozen of long white gloves, ditto of short, and send them off by some ship that is actually in full sail, not lying in that dockyard where Grindlay locks up all the ships. I suppose Fanny has given you most of our private history, so I have given you this little touch of our public history. William is gone tiger-shooting. Our new doctor is, I think, a very remarkable boxer, and does not suit George at all. However, he is a good-natured man, and if he would leave off cutting little melancholy jokes and making a face like a rabbit when he laughs at them, and if he would not ask such a quantity of small questions, there would be no harm in him. Your affectionate E. E. _Miss Eden to the Countess of Buckinghamshire._ CALCUTTA, _May 6, 1841_. MY DEAREST SISTER, Fanny means to write to you a line herself before the post goes, and indeed may probably be strong again before the express starts; but in the meanwhile I may as well begin a regular letter, as she will not be able to do much. I am convinced we are all many hundred years old, and barring that I have lost my hair, and my teeth, and my eyesight, and I rather think my hearing, and am quite yellow and probably stoop a little, I am very juvenile, and I must own never had such good health in my life. Between ourselves, our doctor is a perfect calamity, and George had nearly yesterday made up his mind to get rid of him, but it would be a strong measure. He has taken all the pains he could about Fanny, but he is evidently an ignorant man on the subject of medicine, which is a little unlucky for a doctor, and in other respects the greatest bore I ever encountered--a sort of thing that makes one wag one’s ears and stamp, he is so tiresome and slow. What has knocked him up with George is his treatment of the natives. Nothing will induce him to take the slightest charge of the servants and their families, and he and I came to a grand blow up on the subject yesterday about a boy who had been bit by a mad dog. George wanted to get rid of him on the spot, but I thought it would be supposed he had been sent away on account of Fanny’s protracted illness, which would be ruin to him in his profession, and it must wait. But Macintosh added up the case as it really stands: “The man is a brute to the natives, and I am very glad that I have hated him ever since he entered the house, and we all do the same.” Yesterday we sent for old Doctor Nicolson, the Sir H. Halford of Calcutta, whom everybody abuses and yet they all send for him, and the other doctors mind every word he says. I have no faith in him myself, except perhaps in these Indian cases, which he has seen enough of the last forty years, and at all events he has put Fanny in better spirits about herself.