Letters from India Volume II/From the Hon F H Eden to Blank 1
My dearest,—You must change your dromedary-man, or perhaps give up the beast dromedary altogether, and try a camelopard. I have got twelve letters by the last ‘overland despatch,’ and none from you. So very odd! so unnatural! so unlike you that I can’t understand it! You are either travelling in foreign parts, or having five or six more cowslips planted round that border. You are capable of either the one thing or the other. It’s no merit of yours, and I am not the very least obliged to you, because you meant me to have none; but I have got a letter from you this very week, finished off June 19, 1837; and, what shows the merit of the letter, it reads just as well now as if you had written it yesterday. And it was three months coming from Calcutta on the head of a coolie.
The weather is perfectly beautiful just now, and the snowy mountains have walked quite near this year; some ignorant people say it is an optical delusion, caused by the clearness of the atmosphere, but I know better than to be taken in by them. I certainly love those hills—positively love them—and I do not positively love anything else in India; but, now we are here a second year, I feel like a daughter of the soil, a son of the clime, a nephew and a niece even.
I give up ten minutes every day to think how we ought be at Calcutta and how we are here, and then I walk to the window—the open window—and look at the hills crimson with rhododendrons and the mountains covered with snow. I also notice the ceilings without punkahs and people riding and walking in the sunshine, which makes me feel like the same species of human creature I was in England. If we finish off the Dost Mahomed war before our time to go home, I mean to declare war upon old Colonel Japp, the magistrate, who lives in a fortified house on a fine, rocky hill. It will take us the odd six months to reduce him, and then we would drive through Calcutta straight on board ship.
I have not told you anything about Tharawaddie lately; we are not at war with him, so it is not from personal pique I speak. But I cannot think it right of him to have flayed fourteen of his subjects alive the other day upon suspicion of some petty crime. There are other horrid stories about him. What it must be to have that sort of man as a despot over one!
has just returned from his tiger-shooting, looking all the better for being run over and having killed thirty-six tigers. When I wrote before, I wonder if I told you about a ‘man-eating’ tiger they were after, and which had killed twenty-six people in six weeks? It had been reported to Government as a terror to that part of the country; but the jungle was so difficult to enter; nobody could follow him. and the gentleman with him tried for four days in vain, and gave it up; but the other day a deputation of villagers went after them, and said it had carried off a boy that morning. Besides their own two elephants they could only get one and a mahout to follow them. They soon found the half-eaten body of the boy, and in time they came upon a tigress and two cubs. They wounded her, and she wounded each of their elephants and disappeared; but they shot a cub, and she charged again and was killed. They found in her lair’ the remains of fourteen bodies and a hunting spear. The most horrid part of the story was that the screams of the poor boy, who was fourteen years old, had been heard by the villager for a whole hour after he was seized. The tigress had evidently given him to the cubs to play with. Such a death to die!
The deaths in this country from wild beasts are very numerous. George was saying just now that the reports from the Agra district of children carried off by wolves are upwards of 300 in one year.