Dear me! I sometimes feel very English just now, but ungainly, and with an idea that you will all laugh at us. I remember so well seeing all the Lowry Coles[509] debark at Lord de Grey’s from the Cape, and they were very unlike other people, and had very odd bonnets on. _September 15._ This must go. We have had a hard-working week,--a great farewell dinner to the Nicolls, and then to attend a play which Sir Jasper bespoke, and which lasted till near one. We luckily did not go till ten, but the audience who had sat there since eight were nearly dead, and we were all horribly hard-worked. Then I have been making a sketch of Dost Mahomed and his family, and he set off this morning for the Upper Provinces, leaving me with one of his nephews unsketched. So this morning, with immense activity I got up early, and Colvin abstracted the nephew from the steamer and brought him to sit for his picture before breakfast. The nephew is very like the picture of Judas Iscariot. They are all very Jewish, but he is a fine subject, and considering Colvin had had no breakfast, he seemed to talk Persian with wonderful animation. Ever, dearest Sister, yours most affectionately, E. EDEN. _Miss Eden to the Countess of Buckinghamshire._ BARRACKPORE, _October 8, 1841._ MY DEAREST SISTER, It is time to be writing again. Only three, or, at most four times more. It makes me yawn and stretch, with a sort of nervous shivering--just as one used to feel as a child the morning before going to the play with the idea that by some particular mischance _that_ day never would come to an end, or that the theatre would tumble down, or somebody take our box. I have those theatrical misgivings and yearnings about the next three or four months, and I wish the September post would come, just to make sure that the new Governor-General[510] is a man of active _packing_ habits. I want to go in February. They say now that going in March makes such a long voyage. I think it is rather lucky that this month’s news did not go home by last month’s mail. That sounds Irish, because, as you justly observe, it is not so easy to advance a month’s news as it might be a month’s allowance; but there is George with his predatory habits up to the ears in preparation for a Burmese war, and if that news had got home in time, the Court of Directors would probably have made a strong objection to a change of rulers at the beginning of a war.