mingled joy and pain the suffering man and his faithful wife were united once more ; but he was broken in health and spirit, though his noble patience still remained. On his body he bore the marks of the cruel treatment that he had received at the hands of his captors. The iron bolt by which he had been fastened to the galley had so galled and injured his leg as to cause the attack that his wife described on the monument. He must have been a man of indomitable courage to have survived such treatment, and to have submitted to the operation mentioned before the use of chloroform was discovered.
Thus passed away one of the good old merchants of Madras, who traded honestly and whose name was never entered in the Company's 'Black Books.' Peter Curgenven's name has long been forgotten in Madras ; but his figure was once familiar in the fort and upon the beach among the shipping ; he was to be seen with his wife in the church of St. Mary's, and he 'took the air' in the evening after service on the sands outside the sea-gate, or loitered by the banks of the Cooum among the oleanders and Persian roses of his garden-house. His widow married for her second husband Lord Somerville, a Scotch baron, whose history is as romantic, though not so tragic and unfortunate, as that of Peter Curgenven, free merchant of Fort St. George.
