CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
mother's kindred, repaid contempt with hate, and, taking to piracy and brigandage, became a terror to those who had outlawed them. While the more timid, priding themselves on their European descent, and clinging to a pitiful imitation of European customs, were driven to menial occupations for a livelihood, and, sinking deeper and deeper in the social scale, made the proud Portuguese names they had inherited a byword through the land for all that was vicious, idle, and degraded. Kiernander's mission work early bore fruit; during his first year in Calcutta he had the satisfaction of receiving fifteen converts, while during the twenty-eight years of his mission in Bengal he baptized over five hundred adult converts, Hindu as well as Portuguese.
Kiernander's wife, a sister of Colonel Fischer of the Madras Army, accompanied him to Calcutta, where she died three years later. A year after her death he married a wealthy widow, a Mrs. Ann Woolley, and at about the same time he received a legacy on the death of a brother in Sweden. This with his first wife's fortune placed him in comfortable circumstances, and in 1767, when his congregation had largely increased, he decided to erect a church at his own expense. The "Mission Church" was accordingly built, at a cost of over sixty-seven thousand rupees, of
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