EARLY YEARS
whom married Englishmen. The eldest, Mary, was the wife of Charles Eyre, by whom the Charnock mausoleum was erected. She died four years after her father, while her husband was agent at Calcutta, and her epitaph is inscribed below that of her father, both being in Latin. It has not been ascertained where Charnock's Hindu wife died, nor the date of her death, but it has always been popularly believed that she died some years before Charnock, and that he buried her at Chuttanutty, and was himself laid in the same grave, on which, tradition says, he had yearly sacrificed a cock on the anniversary of his wife's death.
In November, 1892, two hundred years after the death of Job Charnock, the mausoleum was repaired by the Public Works Department, when advantage was taken of the opportunity to ascertain whether it contained a vault. The Rev. H. B. Hyde, at that time chaplain of St. John's, in a note read at a meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in February, 1893, after stating that no trace of a vault was found, describes the result of the investigation as follows:—
"On visiting the mausoleum' next morning, the 22nd of November, I found that the grave had been opened to a depth of fully six feet, at
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