dency, where the Indian Ocean washes the Malabar
coast. The second was in the Carnatic, on the eastern side of the
leaf, where the waters of the Bay of Bengal wash the Coromandel coast,
where the forts of St. George and St. David protected Madras and a
smaller settlement. The third presidency was up towards the north,
where the sacred Ganges, rushing through its many mouths to the sea,
floods the Hoogly. Here the town of Calcutta was growing up around
Fort William.

{254}

These three little presidencies, plying their poor trade, and depending
for defence upon their ill-disciplined native soldiers, the Sepahis,
whom we have come to call Sepoys, were all that had grown out of the
nearly two centuries of relations with the leaf-shaped Indian land
since first, in 1591, Captain Lancaster sailed the seas; since first
the East India Company sprang into existence. It was not an agreeable
two centuries for Englishmen who ever thought of India to read about.
Two centuries of squabblings and strugglings with Dutch settlers and
with Portuguese settlers, of desperate truckling to native princes. In
1664 the English East India Company found a rival more formidable than
the Dutch or the Portuguese in the French East India Company, which the
astuteness of Colbert set up at Pondicherry, and which throve with a
rapidity that quite eclipsed the poor progress of the English traders.
Even when, in 1708, the old East India Company united its fortunes with
the new Indian Company that had been formed, and thus converted one
rival into an ally, the superiority of the French remained uncontested,
and daily waxed greater and greater, until it began to seem as if, in
the words of Antony to Cleopatra, all the East should call her mistress.

[Sidenote: 1725-1743--The Clives of Market-Drayton]

Such was the condition of affairs in the year 1743, when the apparently
insignificant fact that a young gentleman of a ne'er-do-well
disposition, who seemed likely to come to a bad end in England, and who
was accordingly shipped off to India by his irritated relations,
altered and exalted the destinies not merely of a wealthy trading
company, but of the British Crown. In the market town of
Drayton-in-Hales, better known as Market-Drayton, in Shropshire, there
lived, in the reign of George the First, a Mr. Richard Clive--a man
whose comparatively meagre abilities were divided between the
profession of the law and the cares of a small and not very val