This page has been validated.

CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT

of birds indigenous to this tract, also of the fish frequenting the Hughly. "These," he wrote, "having been collected at the Company's expense, are public property, and should be transmitted to the Court of Directors, although unarranged in botanical or artificial order, which I had reserved for a future day."

Saddest of all are the sentences in which he directs that his "last remains be committed to the ground, in my own garden, on the west side of the Pucka Walled Tank, near to where an Alligator tree now stands, and that my funeral expenses do not exceed rupees three hundred."

These last directions were disregarded: it was probably felt that it would be improper to give so honoured and distinguished a servant of the Company so obscure a burial, and Colonel Kyd was buried, by order of Sir John Shore, in the South Park Street Burying Ground, at a cost of over eight hundred rupees. Although the funeral was conducted with much pomp and ceremony, including "hearse with velvet and plumes and best pall" and "two men in black with dressed staffe, eta, to precede the corpse," and was followed by fifty-three mourners in "black silk scarfs and hatbands," the grave itself, which was made just within the gate of the burying-ground, immediately to the right on

164