Sir Jasper[508] and all the Nicolls family are on the point of setting off for their march through India. Lady Nicolls has done it once before and is fully awake to its horrors, and the young ladies do not like leaving Calcutta, but Lady Nicolls looks so ill that it is lucky she is going. They are a nice English family, and will be a loss here. The married daughter from Madras arrived last week with the first grandchild. Such a hideous little baby--but they are all in such ecstasies with it. I went there this morning and found our Miss Nicolls with the thermometer at 1000, I believe, walking up and down the room with the baby, away from the punkah because they thought it made the child sneeze. The perspiration was streaming down her face, and there was old Sir Jasper in a white jacket snapping his fingers and saying, Bow, wow, wow, and then rushing back to the punkah and saying he really could not stand the heat, but perhaps the baby with her cold had better not venture near the punkah. I believe the child was boiled; it looked like it. I think I ought to be excused a few small sins for the merit of going to the Nicolls this hot day. There is an old blind General of 98 at Barrackpore, and his wife (who is 84) has just been couched, and sees with one eye, which is the only eye they have between them, and now the old man is going to be couched, and their pet doctor is ordered off with one of the marching regiments. They applied for an exchange for the doctor, which Sir Jasper refused, and the old lady came crying about it to Barrackpore last week; but I did not think I could well ask for it. However, she wrote a moving letter yesterday, and it is so hard at 90 and 80 to be thwarted in one of the very few wishes one can form, that I took courage, and set off this morning and expounded the case to Sir Jasper, who is very good-natured, and I rather think will do what they want. Sir Henry Fane would have snapped anybody’s nose right off who had asked him for any favour of the sort. It will make the old Morleys very happy. The glare was so great that I think I shall have to be couched too; but that, of course, the doctor will do gratis. My eyesight is shockingly bad--I mean even for my age--and I have a strong and decided preference for large print. I quite forget what one does of an evening in England. Here we dine at eight and go to bed at ten, so a short game at cards after coffee fills up the time, and nobody can read by the flickering lights here. Perhaps you will play at Beg-of-my-Neighbour with me; and then we shall step out, and smell the night-blooming stock in that little round border by the breakfast-room, and listen to the nightingales, and then go to bed, and I hope you will tell the bearers not to go to sleep when they are pulling the punkah in the company-room, because that wakes me.