I have been doing a quantity of drawings for the fancy sale. I wish you could buy some. There is a Mr. ---- here who draws beautifully, and he is doing a picture for me of three of the fattest objects in nature--my pony, Chance, and Chance's boy. I do not mean Chance's own man, but his footboy, the boy who cleans his shoes and whets his razors. He was one of the skeletons whom the servants picked up in the starving districts, and, like most of those skeletons, the reaction has been frightful, and the little wretch is such an extraordinary figure, particularly seen in profile, that he makes everybody laugh. It will be a curious picture; and I never saw anything so well done as the pony. I mentioned our fleas to you, I think, in my last letter. They are worse than ever, and bestow their liveliest attentions on W. and me. For the last three nights we have neither of us had any sleep, and the more the rooms are cleaned and worried the livelier the fleas are. We want some new books. I am sure Mr. Wilberforce's Life will be 'sweet pretty reading.' I have just re-read Mrs. Hannah More's Life; that is a jewel of a book both for amusement and for good. I like it much better than I did the first time; and now I have taken for my morning book in bed (I always wake early) dear Madame de Sevigné for the 117th time. It is a very affecting book amongst other merits. She was such a good, warm-hearted woman, and was not loved enough. I wish she was not dead and was here! We rather want more letters about the fashions. I am quite certain, from the unmitigated hatred I feel to the tight bit at the top of my sleeves, that you have all got rid of it, and are swaggering about in the fullest of sleeves again. Indeed, if you are not, it would be only benevolent to say you are! _Letter to J. C., Esq._ Simla, Wednesday, Aug. 22. This is to be really a short letter, for I have sent off so many that I have not the fraction of a new idea left; but I feel it my duty to encourage you in your excellent habit of writing. The letters do not come, on account of the monsoon; but still I feel confident, from my intimate knowledge of your character, that yours _is_ an excellent habit of writing, when the monsoon does not set itself against it.