CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
custom did not die out till nearly fifty years after that period. There are old people still living who can tell of the time when slave boys and girls were ordinary inmates of numbers of European households in Calcutta—children, the larger number of whom had been bought for three or four rupees, from dealers who in turn had purchased them for "a measure of rice" from their starving parents in a famine year, or rescued them from flooded homesteads when the country was swept by a storm-wave, or perhaps snatched them by stealth from the river's bank, where hapless babes were left to perish by the side of a dying or dead mother, the victim of a ghastly "ghat murder" perpetrated in the name of religion.
That the custom of keeping slaves was a recognized one in spite of its being against the order of the Government, we find, not only from the mention of Sir William Jones's boy Otho, but also from another document of the same period, the will of Lieut-Colonel Robert Kyd, who also lies in the South Park Street Burial Ground. By his will, dated 18th May, 1793, a week before his death, Colonel Kyd left legacies, of six rupees and eight rupees monthly respectively, to two boys, Missah and George, "as reparation for having been taken away from their
160
