CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
to be fulfilled. Shortly after his return to Calcutta the skilful and modest surgeon died, and was laid to his rest in the sadly crowded burial-ground of the settlement.
It has been estimated that during the seventy odd years the first Calcutta burial-ground, now St. John's Churchyard, was in use—that is, from 1692 to 1766—no less than twelve thousand bodies must have been interred in that small plot of land. Under these circumstances the same ground must have been used over and over again, and monuments can only have been erected over a few of these graves. Most of the earlier monuments fell into such a ruinous condition that, in 1802, they were taken down, and such of the memorial slabs as remained in good preservation were arranged in a pavement round the Charnock mausoleum. There they remain to this day, the long and often quaint inscriptions in raised letters as clear and fresh in many cases as though newly cut. Hamilton's grave could hardly have had any monument—apparently there was only a simple headstone bearing a record of his name and services,—for, within a very few years his resting-place appears to have been lost among the crowded graves around.
More than sixty years after Hamilton's death,
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