Page:Letters from India Vol 2.pdf/115

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LETTERS FROM INDIA.
103

and their sailors’ dresses look so English and well among all the odd-shaped budgerows and natives on the river. My name is worked in gold and black in so many different directions that I feel concerned; it will become a by-word on the river.

I give up the system I maintained at first—that there was not more illness here than in other. places. I suppose it tells more at the end of the hot weather, but just now it is melancholy to see the fidget of bad health that is going on. It is impossible to get a cabin on board the steamers and pilot schooners that take people to be rolled about at the Sandheads for the recovery of their healths. It is a melancholy country for wives at the best, and I strongly advise you never to let your girls marry an East Indian. There was a pretty Mrs. —— dining here yesterday, quite a child in look, who married just before the ‘Repulse’ sailed, and landed here about ten days ago. She goes on next week to Meemuch, a place at the farthest extremity of India, where there is not another European woman, and great part of the road to it is through jungle, which is only passable occasionally from its unwholesomeness. She detests what she has seen of India, and