The July overland came in yesterday, and I have got your nice _fat_ letter from Newsalls, and the Journal of your last month in London. I remember the pain of leaving London at the end of the second season. It was 'such dreadful hagony,' as the boy says, in 'Oliver Twist,' that I quite enter into T.'s feelings. E. is pretty well for the first year, and I expect will show stronger symptoms of the disease next year. The third year I shall be at home, to hear all about it, which will be amazingly good fun; and in the meantime you cannot imagine the treasures these Journals are. Only think how pleasant! An old Colonel Skinner, a native as black as this ink, whose life you can see in Miss Roberts' book, writes to W. that 'If the Miss Edens do not wish to mortify an old soldier, and bring down his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave, they will accept a pair of shawls he has ordered for them in Cashmere, and which have just arrived. If they return them, he shall imagine they look upon him as a native, and not as an old British soldier.' Nothing evidently could be more palpably indelicate than to refuse them. I am the last woman in the world to hurt anybody's feelings by returning any shawl, to say nothing of a white one, made on purpose in Cashmere; and if he had thrown in a scarf, I should have thought his appearance and complexion only too fair for a British soldier. Do you think they will be long shawls, or square? CHAPTER XLIII. Simla, Friday, Sept. 27, 1839. It appears that our last letters will again be too late for the steamer. G. always keeps the express till it is a day too late for the steamer. In fact, if he _has_ a fault (I don't think he has, but _if_ he has), it is a slight disposition to trifle with the English letters, just on the same principle as he always used to arrive half an hour too late for dinner at Longleat and Bowood. He never will allow for the chance of being too late, and now, for two months running, his despatches have been left at Bombay. We had our fancy fair on Wednesday, which went off with great _éclat_, and was really a very amusing day, and moreover produced 6,500 rupees, which, for a very small society, is an immense sum. When we arrived at the 'Auckland Gate,' which was the same as last year, we were stopped by a gang of gipseys, who had their little tent and their donkey, and the pot boiling on three sticks, and a boy plucking a fowl and another with a hare, &c. X. and L. and a Captain C. were disguised as gipseys, and the most villanous-looking set possible; and they told our fortunes, and then came on to the fair and sang an excellent song about our poor old Colonel ---- and a little hill fort that he has been taking; but after the siege was over, he found no enemy in it, otherwise it was a gallant action. X. showed me the song some days ago, and I thought it might affront the old man if it came upon him unawares, so they showed it to him first, and he adopted it as his own joke.