Note 21 — Chapter IV · SHOWING HOW MISS FREYNE BECOMES ACQUAINTED WITH HER SURROUNDINGS.

Mr F. True, my girl, and our generations are but short ones in Bengall. Yet it seems to me, seeing you, only yesterday that I took leave of my Sally on the deck of the Sunderland (for I had accompanied her out to sea as far as I might go). The iya stood behind her, holding her infant (that was you, miss), christened by the Padra in haste that very day. Your mother would have you named Sylvia, saying that her own name was so ugly she would choose a sweet pretty one for her baby, and ’twas as much for your sake as her own that she embarked upon that voyage to the Cape of Good Hope which the physician said would save both your lives, for that season was a prodigious unhealthy one at Fort William. The Company’s rule forbids its servants to leave their posts unless sent on business by the Council here, and I durst not throw up the Service if I did not wish us all to starve. So I went back to my work, and managed to scrape together a sufficiency of money to enable me to hire the house we now have from Omy Chund, the Gentoo shroff[21] that owns half Calcutta. ’Twas an agreeable place enough, and cooler than my old quarters in the Fort, and I watched for the coming of the ships from home, which should bring my Sally back to me from the Cape. Instead of that, the first that arrived brought me the news of her death. She had died at sea, and the child was gone on to England with its nurse, to be bred up, as its mother had desired, by the two French gentlewomen who had instructed herself. Does my girl recollect anything of that voyage?