and was
a bachelor, without any relatives in India to mourn his loss. His
colleagues gave him a grand funeral; but his death meant promotion for
some of those selfsame colleagues, and his place in the Company's
service was filled up by an official 'Order' on the following day. A
big monument in the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar ugliness was
piously built over his remains, and possibly there was genuine regret
at a good fellow's loss; but water is less thick than blood, and there
was no near one or dear one in India to take affectionate care of the
big tomb; so it was left to itself to be taken care of by the people
of Black Town. An unofficial description of Madras dated 1711 speaks
of the 'stately Tombs' in the English cemetery, and an official Record
of the same year speaks of the unhallowed uses to which the stately
tombs were put. The Record says that "Excesses are Comitted on
hallowed ground," and that the arcaded monuments were "turned into
receptacles for Beggars and Buffaloes." We have seen in a previous
chapter that the French, when they captured Madras, demolished the
greater part of old Black Town together with its wall, and that the
English, when they were back in Madras, completed the work of
demolition. In the two-fold destruction, both French and English had
sufficient respect for the dead to leave the tombs alone. But, now
that Black Town was gone, the big tombs were the nearest buildings to
the walls of White Town and Fort St. George; and when the French under
Lally besieged Madras a few years later, they used the 'stately Tombs'
as convenient cover for their attack on the city. The cemetery now was
a receptacle not for beggars and buffaloes but for soldiers and guns.
The siege lasted sixty-seven days, during which the cemetery was a
vantage ground for successive French batteries. It is therefore not to
be wondered at that when Count Lally had raised the unsuccessful
siege, the authorities at Fort St. George decided that the 'stately
tombs' were to disappear. The tombs themselves were accordingly
destroyed, but the slabs that bore the inscriptions were laid in St.
Mary's churchyard. At a later date some of them were taken up and were
removed to the ramparts, for the extraordinary purpose of 'building
platforms for the guns,'[2] but eventually they were restored to the
churchyard and were relaid as we see them to-day.

[Footnote 2: Rev. F. Penny's _Church in Madras_, vol. i, p. 366.]

When the burying