Emily Eden

“ We send a great many to England, and her conduct in returning none is unhandsome and unfair. If you were to catch a camel, fill two hampers with letters, and put them on its back, I believe he would find his way here, overland. The mercantile people here have some unknown means of carrying on communication with England. I suspect—I don’t positively know—but I strongly suspect that that is their method. They will feel pretty considerably surprised and baffled when they see our aristocratic, intellectual camel trotting among their mercenary trading herd. ”

“ There are the stunted trees dyed red by the fine red sand that flies everyhere; and the great flats, covered with most of our finest hot-house plants, turned into large shrubs; also immense arid, rugged hills rising up suddenly, and the negroes wearing a kind of sugar-loaf hat, driving sometimes eighteen or twenty oxen, in long, low waggons. ”

“ Then a little thatched hut stationary on the water; that is an up-country boat, which has probably been three months making its way to Calcutta, advancing in the day and anchoring in the night, and from these boats there is generally a great sound of heathen voices. The boatmen seem to me to be the only natives who have any animal spirits.
The evenings are beautiful now, when the fogs are not too heavy; really cool enough to make me glad of a thick shawl. But all the year round, the sun is too hot for anyone to go out in the middle of the day. I have such a prodigy of a bird ”

“ The ‘Jupiter’ will take them, and at the same time will take home a regiment consisting of 480 men, 100 children, and women in proportion: all to inhabit our empty cabins. I suppose, as the thermometer will not be much above a hundred in the shade, that the prospect naturally gives Captain Grey the most unfeigned pleasure.
When we go up the country, I shall send you something really pretty, to show what our subjects can do. In Calcutta, there are only things that one gets in London, and at a fourth of the price, upon the same principle that nobody gets good fish near the sea. ”

“ Female intellect certainly does not flourish in India. There is a strong confederacy against allowing them to have any ideas; and it seems to me they have ceased struggling against it: however, at Calcutta we see so many, there is no time for discovering individual merit. ”

“ To be sure, the prisoners in Newgate have more liberty during the day, for they can, I believe, walk about the prison-yard and look out of their grated windows. From sunrise to sunset we are shut up, and the glare is too great to look out; our cells are more spacious, and we never stole, or murdered ”

“ All the black faces, relieved by scarlet, look remarkably well.
The up country people are really the finest I have seen anywhere, and they look like grander samples of soldiers than our white people; perhaps they don’t fight so well. ”

“ Nobody can have been anywhere as long as we have been on board this ship. We are not at the Cape yet: we are to be there, they say, in two or three days; but I am not to be taken in by anything any sailor says—you and I, dear, know them better. I don’t think that the marines are happy, and the troop of engineers we are transporting to Ceylon, with their military sagacity are not to be taken in any more than myself. ”

“ Such an enormous mass, and neither fish nor bird took the trouble to get out of our way: they evidently thought that man had no right to meddle with the sea or its inhabitants; and I think so too. He cannot manage the sea; it heaves and tosses him about just as it pleases. ”

“ Two very meritorious little parrots, the size of sparrows, who always slept hanging by their claws with their heads downwards, have died this week—of apoplexy, I suppose. And a paroquet with a plum-coloured head, who has every merit a paroquet can (and more than most human beings do) possess, is dangerously ill, and has its own doctor attending it twice a day. ”

“ The tailors who sit stitching at our doors, make our bonnets; and we, who are not above China silks, find them a very easy article of dress to get; in fact, they will soon be the only articles we have to wear, for while this rainy season lasts, the milliners would rather die and be buried in their own tin boxes, than open one to give us out a gown. ”

“ The waste and cost of every article of dress here is quite wonderful; but still the climate is not yet worse than I expected—rather better, in spite of heat and damp; for the house is not very hot, thanks to the punkahs. ”

“ The other two ladies regularly get upon their elephants, and go tiger-hunting every day—talk of the excitement of the tiger’s spring, and the excellent day it was when they saw eight killed. I happen to be very much afraid of a cat—I may say, a kitten ”

“ Those clever creatures, the Chinese, only send their worst manufactures out of the country, but now and then a Chinese captain abstracts some article that gives a great idea of the treasures which might be procured there. They make silks with embossed flowers in them, so stiff and grand they would sit up all alone on a chair. ”

“ We heard a great deal before the season began, of the destruction it would bring to us, our birds, our dogs, and iour clothes, but it surpasses all I could imagine. The dogs lay themselves flat down all day and think it too much trouble to walk across the room. ”

“ The weather is growing hotter and hotter, and will for the next two months; then it will grow damper and damper. No milliner will sell silks or satins during these damp months, because ‘they cannot expose them to the air. ”