Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/67

 played this prank to beguile the dreary hours of the zenana, burst out into fits of uncontrollable laughter when the doctor was introduced. The doctor seems to have been greatly fascinated, and describes her as a very beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen years old, with the most perfect symmetry of features he had ever beheld. He left her perfectly well: as he came away he observed multitudes of young females at all the doors and windows tittering and laughing too.

We are still in 1825. June has come with its torturing heat. Lord Amherst had still to discover Simla for the comfort of his successors: and the Governor-General's lady, like other wives of Anglo-Indians, had to make the best of existence in the plains. She thus describes a health excursion up the river in the Government yacht, the Soonamookie:—

'Our party was small, consisting only of Lord Amherst and myself, Sarah and Jeff, Captain Dalgairns, Captain Crole, Mr. Hale, Mr. Marriage, and Dr. and Mrs. Abel, in all ten persons. Pinnaces, budgerows, paunchways, and baggage boats to the number of about fifty; and the servants, boatmen, guard of Sepoys (the latter about forty), in all, amounted to about 500 men.'

They sailed on past the junction of the Húglí with two other rivers by Nadiyá—then described as looking 'nothing more than a native village of huts.' On the 29th they anchored. Lady Amherst describes indigo plantations, palm-trees, and bananas, herds of cattle, tumble-down villages haunted by crocodiles, and the thunder and lightning at intervals. The