Letters from India Volume II/To the Hon Mrs Eden
My dearest Mary,—I think I will run you off a line before we start on our great journey, though I am greatly distressed for time. I know I shall never be ready by Saturday. It is such a bore not being able to leave anything to take care of itself. It makes such a tinning and soldering and knocking, and the ivory things are to be wrapped in flannel, and the carved Chinese things dipped in corrosive sublimate, and the silver things wrapped in paper; and when all this is done and they are carefully tinned, they say we shall, on our return, find the ivory yellow, the wood a heap of dust, and the silver quite black. My books I have sent to General , to be daily dusted and dried, with a clever afterthought if anything happens to him (a real Indian thought), that Captain is his heir, and my books will not be sold off by auction till the aide-de-camp comes back; and he cannot leave us. It is melancholy to see a week after the death of a head of a family everything advertised for sale. They won’t keep, and there are no shops to send them to.