Letters from India Volume II/To the Hon and Rev R Eden
My dearest Robert,—I ought to be writing to you, but somehow you always seem to be George’s property in the writing way, and he really has such limited means in that line that it is robbing the poor, apparently, to interfere with him. We are going to send home soon a quantity of things—I may say a ship-load of goods. I cannot think what you are to do with them. Build eight houses for your children and furnish them handsomely, and then take the chance of our not coming home. But most of these things had better be made over in their packing cases to that shady retreat under the gallery at Lansdowne House, which Lord L proffered us. There are some Chinese folding screens, a Chinese table, a Chinese cabinet—all bulky articles—besides various smaller articles of furniture. We shall have so many Chinese things that I am beginning to make myself harmonise with the house. I have already achieved a yellow parchment complexion of great merit, and can make a handsome plait of long hair; therefore my great care is to pinch my eyes up in the corners and flatten my nose, and, if that can be achieved, there will be something very attractive in the general appearance of Chang Foo Cottage, Knightsbridge. I know I shall be fined or imprisoned before I leave this, for snipping off by irresistible impulse the long plait of hair our Chinese shoemaker wears. It touches the ground, and one snip would have it off. Perhaps I may do it the very last thing, and scuttle off to the ship instantly with it, as my last trophy.
We should not send home all our furniture so soon, but we shall be away from Calcutta a year and a half, and that is quite enough in this country to injure anything that is not daily looked after and aired and wiped and cleaned; but they say that, left in Government House merely to the care of a few natives, the insects and the damp would have destroyed every item before our return. is selling off all his goods, books, arms, horses, curiosities, &c., all to be sold on Thursday; indeed, the newspaper is full of the results of our move. ‘To be sold, the property of Capt. , proceeding to the Upper Provinces with the “GovernorGeneral;”’ then ‘the property of Mr. ,’ ‘the property of the Rev. C. , &c. &c. I should hate that part of an Indian life. People’ are always changing their stations, and at every change they sell off everything, because there are no stages, waggons, or canals by which even a chair can be transported from one place to another, and it is not everybody who can afford a man’s head on which to carry it.