Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/182

 would be always fidgetting about our little territories if we made them prosper, so it is as well to say nothing about them.

We dressed after dinner, and at 10 p.m. the company began to arrive, and at quarter past we marched in, in state, with a guard of honour at the end of the ball-room, who drew their swords and nearly cut us down, I believe. However, we escaped, and then the Commander-in-Chief arrived.

We had several very oddly dressed native princes. One enormous man—a nephew of the King of Oude, only twenty-seven, and very like the pictures of Daniel Lambert; and this immense expanse of person was dressed in a thick gold brocade. He would have made a handsome piece of furniture in a large house. The Vakeel came in state, and as he has never been in European society much before, he proposed bringing his three hundred guards up into the ball-room with him, and was with great difficulty persuaded out of it. We went to supper at twelve, and then had an English country dance, and they were all gone before two.