IN HASTINGS' DAY
authorized him to levy tolls on boats using the waterway, on condition that he deepened the channel and made it navigable. The grant was in the first instance for a period of twelve years, and it paid the enterprising officer sufficiently well for him to obtain an extension of the lease about 1780. He died, however, in 1784, and the Nullah appears to have been neglected and silted up, as in 1806 it was again considerably deepened and enlarged for a length of sixteen miles of its course. The Creek was held in great reverence by the Hindus, as it was believed to have been an old course of the sacred Ganges, in some far back period when the shrine of Kali was raised on its banks at Kalighat. Some idea of the condition of the Nullah in the early days of the English settlement may be formed, when we read that dying Hindus were laid on its muddy banks that their lives might ebb away amid the slime and ooze of the ebbing tide of the sacred stream, and their funeral pyres were lit on the spot where they breathed their last, the remains being cast into the venerated waters.
Other bodies which were cast into the canal and the river, without even a form of cremation, were those of those unfortunate convicts, and they were many, who died while undergoing their sentences. Even as late as 1811, an
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