quarter of Triplicane was named in honour of the same prince.
When the arches were but three years old Stringer Lawrence with his troops probably thundered across them as they retired from the Choultry Plain before the superior forces of Lally (1758). The regiments passed over the moat by the drawbridge, and the great iron- armoured doors of the fort clanged under the archway as they were closed and barred. A clamouring crowd of natives fleeing before the invaders were left outside, for the fort was already crowded. The Wallajah bridge saw them disperse and melt away to seek an uncertain refuge in unprotected Blacktown, or to hide themselves among the palm groves of Chepak and the river swamps. Pigot, the Governor, was obliged to forsake the new garden-house in Triplicane, and he, too, crossed the bridge to take up his abode in the fort.
In later years there were other streams of fugitives, the English inhabitants of the 'garden-houses' that Mackay was erecting on the Choultry Plain, and the people from the Mount, all in fear of the Mysore horse- men, who were more intent upon loot than on conquering a country in which they had no intention of settling. It took many years to subdue those hardy cavalrymen of the plateau of Mysore. The old 19th Dragoons, who frequently crossed swords with them, used to complain that they could never get the Mysoreans and Mahrattas 1 on the raw,' they were so padded and armoured and turbaned. The irate troopers adopted the trick of riding at their opponents' turbans, tilting them off, and then slashing at their bare skulls, a plan which they found effective.
Over the Wallajah bridge rode Warren Hastings as he conducted his fellow-passenger, Mrs. Imhoff, to his garden-house at the Mount, where she stayed with him
