We had a great dinner yesterday; but they are much less dull and formal since that new arrangement of sitting in the Marble Hall, where nobody can sit in a circle, if they wish it ever so much.
I am quite well again, and began riding again yesterday. All the others are quite well too. In three months our advanced guard of horses, goods, &c., will be setting off. They go six weeks before us, or two months, as we shall go by steamer to Allahabad. We make all these arrangements before George, who says nothing, but has, in fact, made up his mind to go. Sir H. Fane writes such delicious accounts of the mountains, and he says that now, when we are all melting, they have roaring fires morning and evening, and are out all day. ‘Can such things be, and overcome us like a winter cloud, without our special wonder?’ Well, I begin to see things in Lord ’s cheerful way. In five months we shall be travelling, and we shall be marching about for a year and a half, and then we shall not have quite two years more of Calcutta; and then there is only the voyage, and then you must be at Portsmouth if we go by sea, or Dover if overland. I think you had better go
