"Mansions" or blocks of flats as there are now, and generally the city
was a very different place to the Calcutta of to-day. The floods in
the streets are pretty bad at the present time after a heavy monsoon
storm, but nothing like what they were then, I remember going to
office one morning after three days and nights of heavy rain, and at
the cornet of Park and Free School Streets, where Park Mansions stand
now, there was quite a lake from which as I was passing I was startled
to see a tall form rise from the water. It was one of the masters of
the Doveton College, who had taken his boys to bathe there, and the
water must have been fully three or four feet deep!

The residential quarter was then, as now, "South of Park Street," with
the difference that where Alipore Park now is was a big open field
with a factory, which was called the Arrowroot Farm Rainey Park, Bally
gunge, was a big building called Rainey Castle, standing in its own
extensive grounds, owned by a Mr. Griffiths, and occupied as a
chummery. On the other side was a large building with an enormous
compound called the Park Chummery, now converted into the Park,
Ballygunge, while Queen's Park and Sunny Park were waste jungly land.


SCOTT'S LANE MISSION.

There were no Canons at the Cathedral in my early days. The services
were conducted as now, principally by the Senior and Junior Chaplains,
the Bishop and Archdeacon occasionally taking part when in residence
in Calcutta. Scott's Lane Mission was started in Bishop Millman's
time, from very small beginnings, in the year 1872, by the late Mr.
Parsons, former Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, and myself. How
I became connected with the opening of the Mission Was in this wise. I