He Only Left Bombay Yesterday
Morning, Was Seen In The Red Sea On Tuesday, Is Engaged To Dinner
This Afternoon
In the Regent's Park, and (as it is about two
minutes since I saw him in the courtyard) I make
No doubt he is by
this time at Alexandria, or at Malta, say, perhaps, at both. Il en
est capable. If any man can be at two places at once (which I
don't believe or deny) Waghorn is he.
Six o'clock bell rings. Sixty people sit down to a quasi-French
banquet: thirty Indian officers in moustaches and jackets; ten
civilians in ditto and spectacles; ten pale-faced ladies with
ringlets, to whom all pay prodigious attention. All the pale
ladies drink pale ale, which, perhaps, accounts for it; in fact the
Bombay and Suez passengers have just arrived, and hence this
crowding and bustling, and display of military jackets and
moustaches, and ringlets and beauty. The windows are open, and a
rush of mosquitoes from the Ezbekieh waters, attracted by the wax
candles, adds greatly to the excitement of the scene. There was a
little tough old Major, who persisted in flinging open the windows,
to admit these volatile creatures, with a noble disregard to their
sting - and the pale ringlets did not seem to heed them either,
though the delicate shoulders of some of them were bare.
All the meat, ragouts, fricandeaux, and roasts, which are served
round at dinner, seem to me to be of the same meat:
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