ample. Armenians from Persia, like their
fellow-countrymen the Parsees, have a racial gift for commerce; and
Armenian merchants had been in India long before the English arrived.
Enterprising Armenian merchants settled in Madras in its early days to
trade with the English colonists, and the Company's agents were glad
to have as middlemen such able merchants who were in close touch with
the people of the land. The most celebrated of the earlier Armenians
in Madras was Peter Uscan, Armenian by race but Roman Catholic in
religion, who lived in Madras for more than forty years, till his
death there in 1751, at the age of seventy. He was a rich and
public-spirited merchant. He built the Marmalong Bridge over the Adyar
river, on one of the pillars of which a quaint inscription is still to
be read, and he left a fund for its maintenance; he also renewed the
multitude of stone steps that lead up to the top of St. Thomas's
Mount. His inscribed tomb is to be seen in the churchyard of the
Anglican Church of St. Matthias, Vepery, which in olden days was the
churchyard of a Roman Catholic chapel. Within the last half-century
the Armenian community in Madras has been rapidly declining, as the
result, probably, of inability to cope with the hustling style of
commercial competition in these latter days; and only a very few
representatives of the race are now to be seen in the city.

In Mint Street there is a small enclosure which is the remains of what
was once a Jewish cemetery of considerable size; and the graves that
are still to be seen are interesting reminders of the fact that in
bygone times there was a Hebrew colony in Madras. In more than one of
the Company's old records the Jews in Madras are referred to as being
rich men, some of whom held positions of high civic authority. Some of
them were English Jews, and others were Portuguese; and most of them
were diamond merchants, on the look-out for diamonds from the mines of
Golconda, which were formerly very productive. The English Jews
exported diamonds to England, and imported silver and coral to Madras;
coral was in great demand in India, and was sent out by Jewish firms
in London. There is still a 'Coral Merchants' Street' in Madras, a
continuation of Armenian Street, and it is a living reminder of the
old Jewish colony. The Golconda mines eventually ceased to be
productive, and Jewish diamond merchants are no longer to be seen in
the city, and the Jewish colony has long sinc