ersed in garrisons, and could not easily be brought together;
and one small detachment under Colonel Baillie, who were made prisoners
at Conjiveram, suffered a frightful captivity. Sir Eyre Coote did,
indeed, keep the enemy in check, and defeat him in several battles, but
had not at first sufficient numbers or stores effectually to drive him
back; and the whole province of Tanjore was horribly wasted. The
irrigation of the district had been broken up by the invaders; there was
for three years neither seed-time nor harvest, and the miserable peasants
crawled into the towns to perish there, often with their sons carried off
to form a regiment of youths whom Hyder Ali was bringing up as a sort of
Janissaries.

The unhappy creatures lay dying along the sides of the road, and among
them moved from one to another that homely figure in the black dimity
dress, and his catechists with him, feeding those who could still
swallow, and speaking words of comfort to those who could hear. Some of
the English sent a monthly subscription, which enabled Swartz to keep up
the supply, so that a hundred and twenty a day were fed; but often in the
morning he found the dead lying in heaps, and in one of his letters he
mentions that his catechists are alive, as though he regarded it as a
wonder and a mercy. Indeed he seems to have been a very Joseph to the
Rajah, and even to the English garrison. There was absolutely no
magazine for provisions, either for the Sepoys or the Rajah's own troops,
and twice he was implored, both by Tuljajee and the Company, to purchase
supplies and get them brought in, since they were unable to do so, "for a
want of good understanding with the natives who still possessed either
rice or oxen to transport it." He was enabled to procure the supply, and
then there was no place to store it in but his own new English church, so
that he was obliged to hold three services on a Sunday in the other: from
eight till ten in English, from ten till twelve in Tamul, and from four
till five in Portuguese! About a hundred converts were gained during the
famine; but he was forced to teach them very slowly, their mental
faculties were so weakened by their state of exhaustion. The whole of
the towns of Tanjore and Trichinopoly were, he says, filled with living
skeletons, there was hardly an able or vigorous man to be found, and in
this distress it was necessary to relax the ordinarily wise rule of never
giving any assistance to