Page:John Russell Colvin.djvu/26

18 and, with the first shock to the heavy atmosphere of the Maidán, the phantoms slip back into their graves.

James, younger brother to Alexander Colvin, and twelve years junior to his brother, having been born in 1768 — youngest, indeed, of eight sons — had as a lad entered the navy. Leaving it while still a midshipman, he sailed to Calcutta to join Alexander; and from the date of his arrival there, early in the eighties, until the present hour, the family has been directly represented in India, in the male line of the younger brother. James, returning later in 1789 to England to recover health, found himself present at the taking of the Bastille. In 1802 he married, in Calcutta, Maria daughter of William Jackson, 'Attorney to the East India Company,' and 'Register,' as the functionary was then termed, to the Supreme Court at Calcutta. To them in Calcutta, in the business house in Hastings Street, part of which they occupied as their own, there was born on May 29, 1807, their fourth child; a son subsequently named John Russell, who is the subject of the present Memoir.

Like other Anglo-Indian children John Colvin was taken home at an early age. In 1812 he was received at St. Andrews, with his eldest brother Bazett, in the house of an uncle, Thomas Binny, formerly a merchant in Madras, who had married Mrs. James Colvin's eldest sister. There he remained till 1821, living for most of the time in a house now known as Prior's Gate, on the south side of South Street, immediately adjoining the Pends. The house next to it on the