The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary Part 14

Nor can we omit to record the opinion of Carey's chief pundit, with whom he spent hours every day as a fellow-worker. The whole body of law-pundits wrote of Sati as only "permitted." Mritunjaya, described as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and the Supreme Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is the law for a widow. At best burning is only an alternative for mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law.

But in former ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being peculiar to a later and more corrupt era. "A woman's burning herself from the desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with abhorrence," wrote this colossus of pundits. Yet before he was believed, or the higher law was enforced, as it has ever since been even in our tributary States, mothers had burned with sons, and forty wives, many of them sisters, at a time, with polygamous husbands.

Lepers and the widows of the devotee cla.s.s had been legally buried alive. Magistrates, who were men like Metcalfe, never ceased to prevent widow-murder on any pretext, wherever they might be placed, in defiance of their own misguided Government.

Though from 4th December 1829--memorable date, to be cla.s.sed with that on which soon after 800,000 slaves were set free--"the Ganges flowed unblooded to the sea" for the first time, the fight lasted a little longer. The Calcutta "orthodox" formed a society to restore their right of murdering their widows, and found English lawyers ready to help them in an appeal to the Privy Council under an Act of Parliament of 1797. The Darpan weekly did good service in keeping the ma.s.s of the educated natives right on the subject. The Privy Council, at which Lord Wellesley and Charles Grant, venerable in years and character, were present, heard the case for two days, and on 24th June 1832 dismissed the pet.i.tion!

Though the greatest, this was only one of the crimes against humanity and morality which Carey opposed all his life with a practical reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to create triumph. He knew the people of India, their religious, social, and economic condition, as no Englishman before him had done. He stood between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our intimate contact with all cla.s.ses as detailed administrators and rulers. The outcome of his peculiar experience is to be found not only in the writings published under his own name but in the great book of his colleague William Ward, every page of which pa.s.sed under his careful correction as well as under the more general revision of Henry Martyn. Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Princ.i.p.al Works, published in 1818 in two quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best authority on the character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great Britain had been made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of Asia missionaries of n.o.bler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers covered China and the farther East.

All the crimes against humanity with which the history of India teems, down to the Mutiny and the records of our courts and tributary states at this hour, are directly traceable to lawless supernaturalism like that of the civilised world before the triumph of Christianity. In nothing does England's administration of India resemble Rome's government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood alone in facing, in fighting with divine weapons, in winning the first victories over the secular as well as spiritual lawlessness which fell before Paul and his successors down to Augustine and his City of G.o.d.

The gentle and reasonable but none the less divinely indignant father of modern missions brings against Hindoo and Mohammedan society accusations no more railing than those in the opening pa.s.sage of the Epistle to the Romans, and he brings these only that, following Paul, he may declare the more excellent way.

As Serampore, or its suburbs, is the most popular centre of Jaganath wors.h.i.+p next to Pooree in Orissa, the cruelty and oppression which marked the annual festival were ever before the missionaries' eyes. In 1813 we find Dr. Claudius Buchanan establis.h.i.+ng his veracity as an eye-witness of the immolation of drugged or voluntary victims under the idol car, by this quotation from Dr. Carey, whom he had to describe at that time to his English readers, as a man of unquestionable integrity, long held in estimation by the most respectable characters in Bengal, and possessing very superior opportunities of knowing what is pa.s.sing in India generally: "Idolatry destroys more than the sword, yet in a way which is scarcely perceived. The numbers who die in their long pilgrimages, either through want or fatigue, or from dysenteries and fevers caught by lying out, and want of accommodation, is incredible.

I only mention one idol, the famous Juggernaut in Orissa, to which twelve or thirteen pilgrimages are made every year. It is calculated that the number who go thither is, on some occasions, 600,000 persons, and scarcely ever less than 100,000. I suppose, at the lowest calculation, that in the year 1,200,000 persons attend. Now, if only one in ten died, the mortality caused by this one idol would be 120,000 in a year; but some are of opinion that not many more than one in ten survive and return home again. Besides these, I calculate that 10,000 women annually burn with the bodies of their deceased husbands, and the mult.i.tudes destroyed in other methods would swell the catalogue to an extent almost exceeding credibility."

After we had taken Orissa from the Marathas the priests of Jaganath declared that the night before the conquest the G.o.d had made known its desire to be under British protection. This was joyfully reported to Lord Wellesley's Government by the first British commissioner. At once a regulation was drafted vesting the shrine and the increased pilgrim-tax in the Christian officials. This Lord Wellesley indignantly refused to sanction, and it was pa.s.sed by Sir George Barlow in spite of the protests of Carey's friend, Udny. In Conjeeveram a Brahmanised civilian named Place had so early as 1796 induced Government to undertake the payment of the priests and prost.i.tutes of the temples, under the phraseology of "churchwardens" and "the management of the church funds." Even before the Madras iniquity, the pilgrims to Gaya from 1790, if not before, paid for authority to offer funeral cakes to the manes of their ancestors and to wors.h.i.+p Vishnoo under the official seal and signature of the English Collector.

Although Charles Grant's son, Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius had done on the fall of pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that "in all matters relating to their temples, their wors.h.i.+p, their festivals, their religious practices, their ceremonial observances, our native subjects be left entirely to themselves," the identification of Government with Hindooism was not completely severed till a recent period.

The Charak, or swinging festival, has been frequently witnessed by the present writer in Calcutta itself. The orgie has been suppressed by the police in great cities, although it has not ceased in the rural districts. In 1814 the brotherhood thus wrote home:--

"This abominable festival was held, according to the annual custom, on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days after the first swinging, certain natives revived the ceremonies. As Mr. Ward was pa.s.sing through Calcutta he saw several Hindoos hanging by the heels over a slow fire, as an act of devotion. Several Hindoos employed in the printing-office applied this year to Mr. Ward for protection, to escape being dragged into these pretendedly voluntary practices. This brought before us facts which we were not aware of.

It seems that the landlords of the poor and other men of property insist upon certain of their tenants and dependants engaging in these practices, and that they expect and compel by actual force mult.i.tudes every year to join the companies of sunya.s.sees in parading the streets, piercing their sides, tongues, etc. To avoid this compulsion, many poor young men leave their houses and hide themselves; but they are sure of being beaten if caught, or of having their huts pulled down.

The influence and power of the rich have a great effect on the mult.i.tude in most of the idolatrous festivals. When the lands and riches of the country were in few hands, this influence carried all before it. It is still very widely felt, in compelling dependants to a.s.sist at public shows, and to contribute towards the expense of splendid ceremonies."

The Ghat murders, caused by the carrying of the dying to the Ganges or a sacred river, and their treatment there, continue to this day, although Lord Lawrence attempted to interfere. Ward estimated the number of sick whose death is hastened on the banks of the Ganges alone at five hundred a year, in his anxiety to "use no unfair means of rendering even idolatry detestable," but he admits that, in the opinion of others, this estimate is far below the truth. We believe, from our own recent experience, that still it fails to give any just idea of the destruction of parents by children in the name of religion.

One cla.s.s who had been the special objects of Christ's healing power and divine sympathy was specially interesting to Carey in proportion to their misery and abandonment by their own people--lepers. When at Cutwa in 1812, where his son was stationed as missionary, he saw the burning of a leper, which he thus described:--"A pit about ten cubits in depth was dug and a fire placed at the bottom of it. The poor man rolled himself into it; but instantly, on feeling the fire, begged to be taken out, and struggled hard for that purpose. His mother and sister, however, thrust him in again; and thus a man, who to all appearance might have survived several years, was cruelly burned to death. I find that the practice is not uncommon in these parts.

Taught that a violent end purifies the body and ensures transmigration into a healthy new existence, while natural death by disease results in four successive births, and a fifth as a leper again, the leper, like the even more wretched widow, has always courted suicide." Carey did not rest until he had brought about the establishment of a leper hospital in Calcutta, near what became the centre of the Church Missionary Society's work, and there benevolent physicians, like the late Dr. Kenneth Stuart, and Christian people, have made it possible to record, as in Christ's days, that the leper is cleansed and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.

By none of the many young civilians whom he trained, or, in the later years of his life, examined, was Carey's humane work on all its sides more persistently carried out than by John Lawrence in the Punjab.

When their new ruler first visited their district, the Bedi clan amazed him by pet.i.tioning for leave to destroy their infant daughters. In wrath he briefly told them he would hang every man found guilty of such murder. When settling the land revenue of the Cis-Sutlej districts he caused each farmer, as he touched the pen in acceptance of the a.s.sessment, to recite this formula--

"Bewa mat jalao, Beti mat maro, Korhi mat dabao"

("Thou shalt not burn thy widow, thou shalt not kill thy daughters, thou shalt not bury thy lepers.")

From the hour of Carey's conversion he never omitted to remember in prayer the slave as well as the heathen. The same period which saw his foundation of modern missions witnessed the earliest efforts of his contemporary, Thomas Clarkson of Wisbeach, in the neighbouring county of Cambridge, to free the slave. But Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and their a.s.sociates were so occupied with Africa that they knew not that Great Britain was responsible for the existence of at least nine millions of slaves in India, many of them brought by Hindoo merchants as well as Arabs from Eastern Africa to fill the hareems of Mohammedans, and do domestic service in the zananas of Hindoos. The startling fact came to be known only slowly towards the end of Carey's career, when his prayers, continued daily from 1779, were answered in the freedom of all our West India slaves. The East India answer came after he had pa.s.sed away, in Act V. of 1843, which for ever abolished the legal status of slavery in India. The Penal Code has since placed the praedial slave in such a position that if he is not free it is his own fault. It is penal in India to hold a slave "against his will,"

and we trust the time is not far distant when the last three words may be struck out.

With true instinct Christopher Anderson, in his Annals of the English Bible, a.s.sociates Carey, Clarkson, and Cowper, as the triumvirate who, unknown to each other, began the great moral changes, in the Church, in society, and in literature, which mark the difference between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Little did Carey think, as he studied under Sutcliff within sight of the poet's house, that Cowper was writing at that very time these lines in The Task while he himself was praying for the highest of all kinds of liberty to be given to the heathen and the slaves, Christ's freedom which had up till then remained

"...unsung By poets, and by senators unpraised, Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers Of earth and h.e.l.l confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud, Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind: Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more."

CHAPTER XII

WHAT CAREY DID FOR SCIENCE--FOUNDER OF THE AGRICULTURAL AND HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF INDIA

Carey's relation to science and economics--State of the peasantry--Carey a careful scientific observer--Specially a botanist--Becomes the friend of Dr. Roxburgh of the Company's Botanic Garden--Orders seeds and instruments of husbandry--All his researches subordinate to his spiritual mission--His eminence as a botanist acknowledged in the history of the science--His own botanic garden and park at Serampore--The poet Montgomery on the daisies there--Borneo--Carey's paper in the Asiatic Researches on the state of agriculture in Bengal--The first to advocate Forestry in India--Founds the Agri-Horticultural Society of India--Issues queries on agriculture and horticulture--Remarkable results of his action--On the manufacture of paper--His expanded address on agricultural reform--His political foresight on the importance of European capital and the future of India--An official estimate of the results in the present day--On the usury of the natives and savings banks--His academic and scientific honours--Destruction of his house and garden by the Damoodar flood of 1823--Report on the Horticultural Society's garden--The Society honours its founder.

Not only was the first Englishman, who in modern times became a missionary, sent to India when he desired to go to Tahiti or West Africa; and sent to Bengal from which all Northern India was to be brought under British rule; and to Calcutta--with a safe asylum at Danish Serampore--then the metropolis and centre of all Southern Asia; but he was sent at the very time when the life of the people could best be purified and elevated on its many sides, and he was specially fitted to influence each of these sides save one. An amba.s.sador for Christ above all things like Paul, but, also like him, becoming all things to all men that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time, a captain of labour, a schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the expounder of the cla.s.sical language, the translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure literature, the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the would-be suicide, of the downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific or the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or administrative as his Master did. But even then it was his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics alike to bring nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of these principles to the course of G.o.d's providence and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century.

From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa, the greatest Christian evangelists have been those who have made science and literature the handmaids of missions.

Apart from the extreme south of the peninsula of India, where the Danish missionaries had explored with hawk's eyes, almost nothing was known of its plants and animals, its men, as well as its beasts, when Carey found himself in a rural district of North Bengal in the closing decade of the eighteenth century. Nor had any writer, official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the relation of the people to the soil. India was in truth a land of millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population.

Ignorance and fear had blunted the natural shrewdness of the cultivator. A foul mythology, a saddening demon-wors.h.i.+p, and an exacting social system, covered the land as with a pall. What even Christendom was fast becoming in the tenth century, India had been all through the eighteen Christian centuries.

The boy who from eight to fourteen "chose to read books of science, history, voyages, etc., more than others"; the youth whose gardener uncle would have had him follow that calling, but whose sensitive skin kept him within doors, where he fitted up a room with his botanical and zoological museum; the shoemaker-preacher who made a garden around every cottage-manse in which he lived, and was familiar with every beast, bird, insect, and tree in the Midlands of England, became a scientific observer from the day he landed at Calcutta, an agricultural reformer from the year he first built a wooden farmhouse in the jungle, as the Manitoba emigrant now does under very different skies, and then began to grow and make indigo amid the peasantry at Dinapoor. He thus unconsciously reveals himself and his method of working in a letter to Morris of Clipstone:--

"MUDNABATI, 5th December 1797.--To talk of continuance of friends.h.i.+p and warm affection to you would be folly. I love you; and next to seeing your face, a letter from you is one of my greatest gratifications. I see the handwriting, and read the heart of my friend; nor can the distance of one-fourth of the globe prevent a union of hearts.

"Hitherto I have refrained from writing accounts of the country, because I concluded that those whose souls were panting after the conversion of the heathen would feel but little gratified in having an account of the natural productions of the country. But as intelligence of this kind has been frequently solicited by several of my friends, I have accordingly opened books of observation, which I hope to communicate when they are sufficiently authenticated and matured. I also intend to a.s.sign a peculiar share to each of my stated correspondents. To you I shall write some accounts of the arts, utensils, and manufactures of the country; to Brother Sutcliff their mythology and religion; to Brother Ryland the manners and customs of the inhabitants; to Brother Fuller the productions of the country; to Brother Pearce the language, etc.; and to the Society a joint account of the mission."

He had "separate books for every distinct cla.s.s, as birds, beasts, fishes, reptiles, etc." Long before this, on 13th March 1795, he had written to the learned Ryland, his special correspondent on subjects of science and on Hebrew, his first impressions of the physiography of Bengal, adding: "The natural history of Bengal would furnish innumerable novelties to a curious inquirer. I am making collections and minute descriptions of whatever I can obtain; and intend at some future time to transmit them to Europe."

"MUDNABATI, 26th November 1796.--I observed in a former letter that the beasts have been in general described, but that the undescribed birds were surprisingly numerous; and, in fact, new species are still frequently coming under my notice. We have sparrows and water-wagtails, one species of crow, ducks, geese, and common fowls; pigeons, teal, ortolans, plovers, snipes like those in Europe; but others, entirely unlike European birds, would fill a volume. Insects are very numerous. I have seen about twelve sorts of grylli, or gra.s.shoppers and crickets. Ants are the most omnivorous of all insects; we have eight or ten sorts very numerous. The termes, or white ants, destroy everything on which they fasten; they will eat through an oak chest in a day or two and devour all its contents.

b.u.t.terflies are not so numerous as in England, but I think all different. Common flies and mosquitoes (or gnats) are abundant, and the latter so tormenting as to make one conclude that if the flies in Egypt were mosquitoes, the plague must be almost insupportable. Here are beetles of many species; scorpions of two sorts, the sting of the smallest not mortal; land crabs in abundance, and an amazing number of other kinds of insects. Fish is very plentiful, and the princ.i.p.al animal food of the inhabitants. I find fewer varieties of vegetables than I could have conceived in so large a country. Edible vegetables are scarce, and fruit far from plentiful. You will perhaps wonder at our eating many things here which no one eats in England: as arum, three or four sorts, and poppy leaves (Papaver somniferum). We also cut up mallows by the bushes for our food (Job x.x.x. 4). Amaranths, of three sorts, we also eat, besides capsic.u.ms, pumpkins, gourds, calabashes, and the egg-plant fruit; yet we have no hards.h.i.+ps in these respects. Rice is the staple article of food...

"My love to the students. G.o.d raise them up for great blessings. Great things are certainly at hand."

But he was also an erudite botanist. Had he arrived in Calcutta a few days earlier than he did, he would have been appointed to the place for which sheer poverty led him to apply, in the Company's Botanical Garden, established on the right bank of the Hoogli a few miles below Calcutta, by Colonel Alexander Kyd, for the collection of indigenous and acclimatisation of foreign plants. There he at once made the acquaintance, and till 1815 retained the loving friends.h.i.+p, of its superintendent, Dr. Roxburgh, the leader of a series of eminent men, Buchanan and Wallich, Griffith, Falconer, T. Thomson, and Thomas Anderson, the last two cut off in the ripe promise of their manhood.

One of Carey's first requests was for seeds and instruments, not merely from scientific reasons, but that he might carry out his early plan of working with his hands as a farmer while he evangelised the people. On 5th August 1794 he wrote to the Society:--"I wish you also to send me a few instruments of husbandry, viz., scythes, sickles, plough-wheels, and such things; and a yearly a.s.sortment of all garden and flowering seeds, and seeds of fruit trees, that you can possibly procure; and let them be packed in papers, or bottles well stopped, which is the best method. All these things, at whatever price you can procure them, and the seeds of all sorts of field and forest trees, etc., I will regularly remit you the money for every year; and I hope that I may depend upon the exertions of my numerous friends to procure them.

Apply to London seedsmen and others, as it will be a lasting advantage to this country; and I shall have it in my power to do this for what I now call my own country. Only take care that they are new and dry."

Again he addressed Fuller on 22nd June 1797:--

"MY VERY DEAR BROTHER--I have yours of August 9, 16, which informs me that the seeds, etc., were s.h.i.+pped. I have received those seeds and other articles in tolerable preservation, and shall find them a very useful article. An acquaintance which I have formed with Dr. Roxburgh, Superintendent of the Company's Botanic Garden, and whose wife is daughter of a missionary on the coast, may be of future use to the mission, and make that investment of vegetables more valuable."

Thus towards the close of his six years' sacrifice for the people of Dinapoor does he estimate himself and his scientific pursuits in the light of the great conflict to which the Captain of Salvation had called him. He is opening his heart to Fuller again, most trusted of all:--

"MUDNABATI, 17th July 1799.--Respecting myself I have nothing interesting to say; and if I had, it appears foreign to the design of a mission for the missionaries to be always speaking of their own experiences. I keep several journals, it is true, relating to things private and public, respecting the mission, articles of curiosity and science; but they are sometimes continued and sometimes discontinued: besides, most things contained in them are of too general or trivial a nature to send to England, and I imagine could have no effect, except to mock the expectations of our numerous friends, who are waiting to hear of the conversion of the heathen and overthrow of Satan's kingdom.

"I therefore only observe, respecting myself, that I have much proof of the vileness of my heart, much more than I thought of till lately: and, indeed, I often fear that instead of being instrumental in the conversion of the heathen, I may some time dishonour the cause in which I am engaged. I have hitherto had much experience of the daily supports of a gracious G.o.d; but I am conscious that if those supports were intermitted but for a little time, my sinful dispositions would infallibly predominate. At present I am kept, but am not one of those who are strong and do exploits.

"I have often thought that a spirit of observation is necessary in order to our doing or communicating much good; and were it not for a very phlegmatic habit, I think my soul would be richer. I, however, appear to myself to have lost much of my capacity for making observations, improvements, etc., or of retaining what I attend to closely. For instance, I have been near three years learning the Sanskrit language, yet know very little of it. This is only a specimen of what I feel myself to be in every respect. I try to observe, to imprint what I see and hear on my memory, and to feel my heart properly affected with the circ.u.mstances; yet my soul is impoverished, and I have something of a lethargic disease cleaving to my body...

"I would communicate something on the natural history of the country in addition to what I have before written, but no part of that pleasing study is so familiar to me as the vegetable world."

His letters of this period to Fuller on the fruits of India, and to Morris on the husbandry of the natives, might be quoted still as accurate and yet popular descriptions of the mango, guava, and custard apple; plantain, jack, and tamarind; pomegranate, pine-apple, and rose-apple; papaya, date, and cocoa-nut; citron, lime, and shaddock.

Of many of these, and of foreign fruits which he introduced, it might be said he found them poor, and he cultivated them till he left to succeeding generations a rich and varied orchard.

While still in Dinapoor, he wrote on 1st January 1798: "Seeds of sour apples, pears, nectarines, plums, apricots, cherries, gooseberries, currants, strawberries, or raspberries, put loose into a box of dry sand, and sent so as to arrive in September, October, November, or December, would be a great acquisition, as is every European production. Nuts, filberts, acorns, etc., would be the same. We have lately obtained the cinnamon tree, and nutmeg tree, which Dr. Roxburgh very obligingly sent to me. Of timber trees I mention the sissoo, the teak, and the saul tree, which, being an unnamed genus, Dr. Roxburgh, as a mark of respect to me, has called Careya saulea."

The publication of the last name caused Carey's sensitive modesty extreme annoyance. "Do not print the names of Europeans. I was sorry to see that you printed that Dr. Roxburgh had named the saul tree by my name. As he is in the habit of publis.h.i.+ng his drawings of plants, it would have looked better if it had been mentioned first by him."

Whether he prevailed with his admiring friend in the Company's Botanic Garden to change the name to that which the useful sal tree now bears, the Sh.o.r.ea robusta, we know not, but the term is derived from Lord Teignmouth's name. Carey will go down to posterity in the history of botanical research, notwithstanding his own humility and the accidents of time. For Dr. Roxburgh gave the name of Careya to an interesting genus of Myrtace[oe]. The great French botanist M. Benjamin Delessert duly commemorates the labours of Dr. Carey in the Musee Botanique.

It was in Serampore that the gentle botanist found full scope for the one recreation which he allowed himself, in the interest of his body as well as of his otherwise overtasked spirit. There he had five acres of ground laid out, and, in time, planted on the Linnaean system. The park around, from which he had the little paradise carefully walled in, that Brahmani bull and villager's cow, nightly jackal and thoughtless youth, might not intrude, he planted with trees then rare or unknown in lower Bengal, the mahogany and deodar, the teak and tamarind, the carob and eucalyptus. The fine American Mahogany has so thriven that the present writer was able, seventy years after the trees had been planted, to supply Government with plentiful seed. The trees of the park were so placed as to form a n.o.ble avenue, which long shaded the press and was known as Carey's Walk. The umbrageous tamarind formed a dense cover, under which more than one generation of Carey's successors rejoiced as they welcomed visitors to the consecrated spot from all parts of India, America, and Great Britain. Foresters like Sir D. Brandis and Dr.

Cleghorn at various times visited this arboretum, and have referred to the trees, whose date of planting is known, for the purpose of recording the rate of growth.

For the loved garden Carey himself trained native peasants who, with the mimetic instinct of the Bengali, followed his instructions like those of their own Brahmans, learned the Latin names, and p.r.o.nounced them with their master's very accent up till a late date, when Hullodhur, the last of them, pa.s.sed away. The garden with its tropical glories and more modest exotics, every one of which was as a personal friend, and to him had an individual history, was more than a place of recreation. It was his oratory, the scene of prayer and meditation, the place where he began and ended the day of light--with G.o.d. What he wrote in his earlier journals and letters of the sequestered spot at Mudnabati was true in a deeper and wider sense of the garden of Serampore:--"23rd September, Lord's Day.--Arose about sunrise, and, according to my usual practice, walked into my garden for meditation and prayer till the servants came to family wors.h.i.+p." We have this account from his son Jonathan:--