vernor's House'--was without a garden; and it was only to be
expected that the resident employees, most of whom were young men,
should wish for a recreation ground to which they could resort in
their leisure hours. Some of the wealthy private residents of White
Town had shown what could be done; for they had acquired patches of
land outside the walls, which they had enclosed with hedges and
cultivated as gardens, with a house in the middle of each garden, in
which, as either a permanent or an occasional residence, the owner and
his family might hope to find relief from the stuffiness of the
streets of the rapidly developing city. In the 'Records' any such
villa is spoken of as a 'garden-house' and even now in Madras the term
'garden-house' is occasionally used in Indo-English as signifying a
house that stands within its own 'compound,' as distinct from houses
that open directly into the street.

The Company's agents in Madras realized the desirability of laying out
a garden for the recreative benefit of the Company's employees.
Outside the walls, therefore, of White Town they hedged off some eight
acres of land in the locality in which the Law College now stands, and
they cultivated it as a 'Company's Garden;' and within it they built a
small pavilion. We may imagine that in the cool of the evening it was
common for a goodly number of the Company's mercantile employees to
leave their apartments in the Fort and stroll beyond the walls the
short distance to the 'Garden,' which in those early days was
refreshingly near the seashore. In our mind's eye we can blot the Law
College out of the landscape and can see a party of youthful merchants
engaged as energetically as was suitable to the heat of Madras in the
then fashionable game of bowls--or, less energetically but much more
excitedly, gathered in a ring round two cocks that are tearing each
other to pieces--a particularly popular form of 'Sport' in old Madras;
and, although the Directors in London appropriately forbade to their
employees the use of cards or the dice-box, we can espy a
tense-visaged quartet within the shadow of the pavilion with a 'pool'
of 'fanams' (coins worth about 2-1/2_d_.) on the table, or possibly,
rupees or pagodas, absorbed in a round of ombre or one of the other
card games that were in fashion. The sun has set, and the shadows are
lengthening. A bugle sounds from the Fort; and the employees stroll
back to supper, which, according to an old accou