Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/179

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THE ENGLISH IN INDIA IN 1824
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firms of wine merchants. French millinery was on sale by a European milliner. The Oriental Mercury required printers, a publisher, and even an editor. One is anxious to know how the Mr. Lumley who tried 'farming' at Meerut succeeded. Horatio Nelson—out of pure perversity—chose to be a land surveyor. But we must not linger over the dingy list of those who lived life as it was lived in India seventy years ago, whose very memories have passed away, and who lie—most of them—in some neglected graveyard under the graceless pyramidal pile of brick and stucco, which it was the fashion of the time to erect as the tomb of the European. In the month of May, 1823, there were twenty-nine deaths—mostly of women and children. There were ten weddings.

The members of the Civil Service had their wives, and sometimes their families, living with them. Bishop Heber remarks on the excellent moral tone of the stations in the Mofussil. There is much significance in the testimony which he bears to the high character and piety of the chaplains. Stories, it is clear, were afloat not wholly creditable to the earlier race of the Company's divines.

Let us add—to conclude this sketch of the social atoms—that fifteen advocates practised in the Supreme Court of Judicature at Calcutta, and that seventy-five Attorneys and Public Notaries tendered their services to litigants.

Such was the personnel of society. But the foreign element in it was not wholly English. We read of