Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/574

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PUBLIC BUILDINGS.

interesting as the old church in which Henry Martyn[1] preached, and where David Brown and Thomas T. Thomason held the pastoral office. The building is large, and stuccoed within with chunam of dazzling whiteness. A multitude of lamps in Indian shades illuminate it at night, and punkahs swing in every direction over the heads of preacher and audience, like the waving of branches in a forest. Against the wall, tablets are fixed to perpetuate the memory of the excellent and devoted men who here laboured, Corrie, Brown, and Thomason, and one to the memory of Martyn, who died far away in Tocat, with the simple inscription, "He was a burning and a shining light.” The Cathedral, the Kirk, the Free Church, the Baptist and Independent chapels, are places of interest, and some of them are fine structures. Many of the public and charitable buildings also are on a most noble scale.

If the dweller in Calcutta have in mind the fact that but a hundred years since the English were driven by a Bengal nabob from the place, and that all that he sees is the creation of a single century, by a little band of men in a


  1. See memoirs of Henry Martyn, Thomas T. Thomason, and Catharine Brown, by the American Sunday-school Union.