CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
observer, who seems to have been more curious than shocked, wrote in reference to the convict hospital and the deaths there—
"Their transition is remarkably easy: they lie down to sleep and go off like the snuff of a candle. Their irons are not taken off till they are ascertained to be dead, when they are thrown into the Nullah—Mussulmans, I believe, as well as Hindus."
When Tolly bought "Belvedere," for the sake, no doubt, of its convenient situation as regards his canal, he probably did so from the Murshedabad family. During the Nawab Jaffir Ali's residence in Alipore, his family and retainers must have occupied a very large number of houses, forming quite a colony, as happened in the almost parallel case of the King of Oudh at Garden Reach, a century later, and it was probably one of these houses which Tolly bought and adapted to European requirements, and named it "Belvedere."
There were possibly several such houses in Belvedere grounds, which up to a much later date included the present gardens of the Agri-Horticultural Society. In these latter there stood, until recent years, the crumbling ruins of an old tomb which was known as the Begum's
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