ame of Serampore to a variety
known all over India. At first Carey was compelled to print his
Bengali Testament on a dingy, porous, rough substance called Patna
paper. Then he began to depend on supplies from England, which in
those days reached the press at irregular times, often impeding the
work, and was most costly. This was not all. Native paper, whether
mill or hand-made, being sized with rice paste, attracted the bookworm
and white ant, so that the first sheets of a work which lingered in the
press were sometimes devoured by these insects before the last sheets
were printed off. Carey used to preserve his most valuable manuscripts
by writing on arsenicated paper, which became of a hideous yellow
colour, though it is to this alone we owe the preservation in the
library of Serampore College of five colossal volumes of his polyglot
dictionary prepared for the Bible translation work. Many and long were
the experiments of the missionaries to solve the paper difficulty,
ending in the erection of a tread-mill on which relays of forty natives
reduced the raw material in the paper-engine, until one was
accidentally killed.

The enterprise of Mr. William Jones, who first worked the Raneegunj
coal-field, suggested the remedy in the employment of a steam-engine.
One of twelve-horse power was ordered from Messrs. Thwaites and
Rothwell of Bolton. This was the first ever erected in India, and it
was a purely missionary locomotive. The "machine of fire," as they
called it, brought crowds of natives to the mission, whose curiosity
tried the patience of the engineman imported to work it; while many a
European who had never seen machinery driven by steam came to study and
to copy it. The date was the 27th of March 1820, when "the engine went
in reality this day." From that time till 1865 Serampore became the
one source of supply for local as distinguished from imported and
purely native hand-made paper. Even the cartridges of Mutiny notoriety
in 1857 were from this factory, though it had long ceased to be
connected with the mission.

Dr. Carey thus took stock of the translating enterprise in a letter to
Dr. Ryland:--

"22nd January 1808.--Last year may be reckoned among the most important
which this mission has seen--not for the numbers converted among the
natives, for they have been fewer than in some preceding years, but for
the gracious care which God has exercised towards us. We have been
enabled to carry on the t