His English pupils must have been children of the
very few of the Company's civil or military employees that were
married, or of the still fewer English free settlers. Father Ephraim,
who according to accounts was a really learned man, charged no fees,
yet was deeply interested in the welfare of his scholars; and the
little school must have supplied a great want in those far-off days.
It is interesting indeed to think of that little 'public school;' for
the room in the priest's house was the scene of the very first
beginning of what are now the mighty educational activities of
Madras--an earnest, moreover, of the great things that the Roman
Catholic Church was going to do in the way of education, both for boys
and for girls, in South India.

Father Ephraim's school continued to prosper under his successors, and
in the seventeenth century it was transferred, as a poor-school, to a
building in the grounds of what is now the Roman Catholic Cathedral in
Armenian Street; and in 1875 it was put under the control of the
brothers of St. Patrick, an Irish order of educational monks, and it
became St. Patrick's orphanage. Later the brothers transferred
themselves and their orphanage to the spacious park--Elphinstone
Park--on the southern bank of the Adyar River, the premises which they
occupy still.

For some thirty years the Company took no part in educational work,
and the children of Madras were left entirely to Father Ephraim's
care. Then for two years a certain Master Patrick Warner was the
Company's temporary chaplain of Madras--a conscientious and
uncompromising Protestant minister who wrote some long letters to the
Directors in England denouncing the laxity of the conduct of the
Company's employees and deploring the influence that Roman Catholic
priests had been allowed to obtain in Fort St. George. Finally, he
went back to England, with the threat that he was going to interview
the Directors on various matters pertaining to Madras; and that he
succeeded in making himself heard is to be seen in the fact that in
the following year the Directors sent a Protestant schoolmaster out to
Madras. The letter in which they notified the appointment to the
Governor in Council at Fort St. George was assuredly inspired by
Master Patrick Warner's undoubtedly high-minded representations. They
wrote that, as there were now in Fort St. George 'so many married
families,' they were sending out 'one Mr. Ralph Orde to be
schoolmaster at th